When Ornette was woken from cryostasis, she was being kissed. She was being kissed carefully by someone who was a complete pro. Even though she was groggy, she didn’t have any questions about who she was kissing. It was Desmond and he was finally kissing her the way she wanted. She leaned into it but abruptly pulled back.

  “Sorry,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand. “I opened my mouth and I shouldn’t have. I forgot. When a model from Sleeping Beauty Inc. is woken with a kiss, she’s supposed to keep her mouth closed.”

  He huffed. “You’ve only been in cryostasis for two days. It’s not like your mouth has turned into a cave with crystals growing in it in forty-seven hours. Open your mouth and kiss me.”

  “No. It’s gross. All the literature…”

  He shut her up by kissing her.

  Well, if he didn’t think it was gross… She kissed him back.

  Then the buckles came off from around her and he lifted her out of the cryochamber.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

  “My room,” he answered before he was stopped by a sharp shock of electricity from his bracelet.

  He dropped her. Ornette fell back in the cryochamber and Desmond disappeared from view as he fell on the floor beside her.

  Ornette sat up and saw Vangelis standing at the door with a finger on a bracelet on his wrist. Ornette remembered what Desmond had told her about who controlled his bracelet. His father, Silver Ashley, and her sve, Vangelis. He had dropped Desmond with a shock.

  The sve came over looking bored. He directed his droll comments to Desmond on the floor. “We told you you weren’t allowed to carry anything heavier than twenty pounds after we stitched you shut. You’ll rip your stitches open. Can’t you follow directions?”

  Desmond y panting as he recovered from the shock.

  Vangelis continued talking. “I know Ashley told you you could come get Ornette when you were up to it, but I wouldn’t have permitted you to wake her for another two weeks. I don’t need you finding new ways to rip open your stitches.” He put out a hand and helped Desmond to his feet.

  Desmond favored the doctor with an ugly scowl. “I can’t wait.”

  Vangelis smiled. “I can imagine how difficult that will be for you. Here, I thought you had no desires. Yet, it seems you finally want something. Competition makes cheap things valuable.”

  Ornette knew instantly that he meant her. She was a cheap thing, but through the magic of the competition of Goldilocks Zone, she had become something valuable. It was rude to say, but it was also true.

  She got back inside the cryochamber and started doing up her five-point harness. “If I’m not needed and I’m not allowed to be awake, please put me back under. I would hate to be a nuisance.”

  “Can’t I have her while I’m recovering?” Desmond argued.

  He did need a toy after all!

  Vangelis answered coldly, “You could if you didn’t try to lift her, have sex with her, or otherwise disrupt the good work I did on your torso. Sadly, you’ve already ruined my trust in you. I’d put you in a coma to heal if Ashley didn’t want to hear your opinion about her pns every five minutes.”

  “Can you just leave Ornette awake until I talk to Aunt Ashley then?” Desmond tried again.

  It was at that moment that Desmond’s position as an underling of the Queen of Venus came home to Ornette. He was a sve, exactly like she was, except he had been born into svery, not submitted to it. Maybe his svery was more complete than hers. She thought hard and decided his hardships were different and perhaps unequal.

  What did it mean to be born into svery? For starters, it had to be involuntary. You didn’t choose what family gave birth to you. She had narrow choices: the mines or Jewel Girls, then Jewel Girls or Sleeping Beauty Inc. Maybe he hadn’t had any choices at all. Maybe his torture was opposite to hers. Instead of having his pants pulled down, he had his pants sewn shut. She didn’t know how hard that would be or what that would mean. The curiosity of an unopened door might be unendurable if one didn’t know that the hardships on the other side were worse than any innocence. She didn’t know. She didn’t have any curiosity.

  She was about to say something when a wheelchair was brought in and Desmond was invited to sit in it for his journey to speak to Silver Ashley.

  “I’ll keep Ornette awake until I hear the results of your discussion,” Vangelis offered.

  Desmond got in the chair and was wheeled away by the mechanism in the chair that was programmed to take him to his great-aunt.

  Vangelis stayed with Ornette and leaned against the wall before speaking to her. “Could I offer you a beverage?”

  “Hot apple cider?” Ornette suggested as she tried to moisten her mouth with her dry tongue.

  He sent a message through his bracelet to a lesser servant.

  “What did you think of the show?” she asked the doctor, in order to make conversation since they were just hanging out there. He was leaning against the wall. She was sitting up in her cryochamber seat which was roughly the equivalent of a dentist's chair.

  “I thought the other contestants on the show were very young,” he said calmly.

  Vangelis couldn’t be young. He looked it. He looked young and unwrinkled, muscur and vital, but the math didn't add up. If Ornette hadn’t known who he was or what kind of life he had led, being Silver Ashley’s pything and a surgeon who kept himself and everyone around him young, she would have been very attracted to him. Physically, he was the most impressive man she had ever seen and the tattoo under his jawline threatened to make her insane.

  As he stood there, she decided that the thing that made her most uncomfortable about Varner was that he reminded her of the first owners she’d had. Those men were pedophiles who didn’t need another scandal, so they got the youngest girls they could get legally and had their fun. It was disgusting.

  Vangelis was repelnt in a different way. He was more like the men who had made the rules of Venus and decided that even children who couldn’t pay their way had to be sent to Ceres. He seemed that cold, that distant, and that unconcerned with what crisis could be happening in someone else’s world.

  In the end, she didn’t like him, not even his looks.

  “Can you tell me about the Children’s Charity the money from Goldilocks Zone is supporting?” she finally asked. She didn’t think she would get much out of him, but she bet she would get more than she would if she asked The Coordinator back on the studio lot.

  “No one knows anything about it,” Vangelis answered, obviously grateful to have something to talk about that was not Desmond, Silver Ashley, or the silly girls on the show. “It’s one of the things Desmond was supposed to uncover when he arranged to be chosen as a participant. Having his investigation stalled is one of the unhappy consequences of this chain of events. If Varner had not gone so crazy for you, Desmond would have had more time to follow the money. He needed to see a few more girls auctioned off.”

  “I was hoping it was meant to benefit children who were sent to mine on Ceres when their parents ran out of money. I was one of those children,” she offered.

  “Of course, you were,” Vangelis replied, his face becoming a little softer. “I was sold off at a young age too. If Varner’s scheme is less horrible, it will be a charity that gives a little money to help children who would have been sent to Ceres to go to Earth to be adopted instead. Of course, the charity would absorb most of the administration costs and provide the main funds for other seasons of Goldilocks Zone. If it’s worse, none of the children it ‘helps’ will go to Earth or Ceres.”

  Ornette let her head loll backward as she considered how Vangelis' words could be warped into the worst possible outcome. She flipped her tongue over and said clearly, “Certainly, they won’t be sent to Mars. Isn’t Mars unrecognizable since it was terraformed?”

  “No. They would not be sent to Mars. Mars is being run by people who have the same philosophies as the Church of Voynich on Io. Svery is not allowed. No one can be brought onto the pnet without protections from the government and anyone who participates in any kind of sve contract as an owner is severely punished. On Io, they strap them to the Breastpte of Loki and let Jupiter’s gravity tear them to shreds. On Mars, they strand them on Phobos—a death sentence. No, we think they might be keeping them on Venus.”

  “Where? This pce is like a space station. There are no uncharted spaces. Where are they going to put a pleasure pace?”

  Vangelis looked around and said calmly. “What about here?”

  Ornette pulled her eyebrows together. “What are you saying?”

  He scoffed. “I’m saying that I’m an involuntary sve and, whether you realize it or not, so are you. How many times have you had all the money you were supposed to have saved to pay off your Ceres transportation costs, only to wake up from cryostasis to find that it’s all gone because of rising interest rates or inftion and you have to go back to svery?”

  Ornette choked on her dry tongue and whined. “Yeah. That has happened a few times. I’ve been a sve for almost twenty years.”

  He shook his head. “You’re not counting the time you spent as a sve in a mine on Ceres? If you do, it brings your number up to twenty. The number is even bigger if you count the time you've been in cryostasis. You have been a sve for twenty-seven years, Ornette. And you’ll never stop being one.”

  “No. I have my transportation costs paid up,” she tried to expin, but the look on Vangelis’ face told her she was missing something.

  He shook his head again and expined her naivety. “You’re probably only being allowed to pay off your Ceres transportation debts now because of two things. One is that you haven’t been making enough money to make your sale worth the effort and the other is that if you stay in the game much longer, you’re going to muddy the brand. You’re too old and your hand is bck. Silver Ashley asked me to have a look at it, but I see that Desmond has been using the makeup kit I sent on you. Can we clean it off so I can see how much damage has been done?”

  Ornette nodded and he took a package of wet wipes to her hand to remove the makeup.

  “I thought Sleeping Beauty Inc. was better than Jewel Girls,” she said pitifully as she let him work on her left hand. It had started trembling.

  He calmed her by rubbing her hand down. “From what I have understood, the contract from Jewel Girls was not completely dissolved by your contract with Sleeping Beauty Inc. Sleeping Beauty Inc. still had to py the game that was set up for you through Jewel Girls. The way the money flowed would stay the same, but you would get better treatment through Sleeping Beauty Inc. I think it was worth it for you to change, but they were going to get their money out of you no matter what. The biggest question is where does all that money go?”

  “Why does Silver Ashley care where the money goes? She has sves. She has you,” Ornette moaned.

  Vangelis was bored as he expined, “I have accepted Ashley for who she is, and she is someone who notices where all the money generated by svery goes. The money she spent to get the first floating cities up in the air came from mining and drilling on Earth. Earth had to be raped to give birth to Venus. That’s what she thinks. So, something or someone is being raped to make other things, but what and where? She wants the money flow to change directions. She wants it to go to terraforming Venus. She’s trying desperately to get Beckett Beltrose to come to Venus to have a better look at the problem. He accomplished what no one else could do on Mars and she wants him here. He’s not that different from Ashley. He came from a rich family. He owned sves. Even so, he still hated svery and used his power and his hatred to destroy what Mars was and make it into something new. She adores him… And if she can find evidence that heinous acts of involuntary svery are happening on Venus, she thinks she might be able to get him. We’re looking and the best pce to start looking is Varner and his little Goldilock show where he puts sves on dispy to try to make svery look okay, fun, like the girls are enjoying themselves.”

  “Papa Bear must have hated me,” Ornette said with a ghastly chuckle.

  “Of course, he hated you. That’s why he wanted to rape you,” Vangelis said without humor. He dropped the wet wipe into the garbage. “If he hadn’t had the confines of the show to deal with, he would have done it already.”

  Ornette felt sick, so sick she felt like she was going to vomit blood. Being forced into something with an owner was one thing, having the owner be a man with the size and muscle of Varner was something else. Her blood was cold and her hands were suddenly frostbitten. “How are you guys going to nail him?”

  “That’s what Silver Ashley and Desmond are discussing. They’re deciding if they want to withdraw from the show and take you with them or if they want to send you back and see if you can work your magic with Uncle Bear and Brother Bear. Do you have an opinion?”

  Ornette grabbed her bckened hand to stop it from shaking. “Uh… I guess it depends on what sort of pn they have. If I think I can do it or not. I’d hate to fail. I mean… I already made it very clear that Varner disgusts me. I won’t be able to go back and pretend to py nice with him.”

  It was at that moment that the servant arrived with Ornette’s hot apple cider. She took it in her hands and was warmed by the heat of the cup.

  “Don’t spill that,” Vangelis advised, noticing her tremor. “We’ll wait to hear what they decide.”

  Ornette nodded and tried to drink the spicy liquid.

  ______________

  Author's Notes: Thanks for reading. Tough day. See you Thursday!