Chapter Thirty Three

  Desmond’s helocarrier was tiny. It had two rows of seats. It was much tinier than the one Ornette had ridden with Stonic. They faced each other, so the interior was more like a limousine than a van, but the size was still comparable.

  Outside the windows, it was foggy, but the fog was lit by the impressive sun that hung in the sky. On the surface, the light was much dingier than it had been on Nepra, where the sun reflected against the mountain-sized swirling clouds where the city nested. The change in the light was eerie, as well as the view of the ground. The mantle of Venus was dark grey where the lava had flowed, cooled, and cracked. The fog made ghostly shapes of machinery that had fallen from Nepra and other cloud cities. In the fog, she could see the outlines of fallen panels that had landed on their sides like enormous tombstones. It looked like the god Atlas had failed to hold up the sky, and he was buried there. Other rubble surrounded the fallen panels, but whether or not there were abandoned corpses that fell like dead machinery, the reality was cloaked in a yellowish mist. Ornette had never seen the landscape up close and honestly, she never wanted to. The whole thing gave her the creeps.

  Ornette clicked her tongue. “I sent out a distress call and checked the oxygen levels. It looks like we have two days' worth of emergency oxygen. How well are you stocked for water and food?”

  “All these seats have emergency rations in them,” he said, twitching. “What happened?” He was trying to keep calm. He was trying not to explode.

  “The ruptor burst,” she replied.

  “That doesn’t happen. That has never happened. Ever. Not to anyone,” he replied.

  “Oh relax,” Ornette chided him. “It just means that your helocarrier was sabotaged. Someone knew where you parked it and messed with it. It probably had a diamond drill rigged up to start drilling as soon as you started driving. Who knows? Maybe it had been drilling for weeks, and we only had the misfortune of it bursting today. In any case, I’ve sealed off the cockpit.”

  “Have you ever heard of something like this happening before?” he asked, wincing as he tried to position himself more comfortably.

  “I know ruptors don’t burst on their own. They’re supposed to remain intact through any crash. The people inside can die, but the ruptor will stay unharmed. I used to know about things like that. You know… in my other life.”

  “What other life?” he asked, wincing again.

  “There’s got to be a first-aid kit around here somewhere,” she evaded and started snapping open compartments over their heads until she found the red box. She opened it and found all the good stuff. She gave him a pill for the pain and then popped open a needle pack to administer an antibiotic shot in his hip in case his injury was thinking about getting infected.

  She knew how important it was to talk to someone who was in pain to help them focus on something else, so she needed to talk but wasn’t great at small talk. More importantly, she didn’t want to bother with it. She wanted to tell him the truth. She always wanted her hairdresser, stylist, or nail tech to tell her something real instead of something fake. They were all in it together.

  She didn’t usually talk to her masters like they were real people, but suddenly, she wanted to talk to Desmond.

  Ornette gave him the pills, and he swallowed them dry.

  “Don’t you need a drink of water?” she questioned.

  “Nah. Do you want to redo my dressing?” he asked, looking at the first aid kit.

  “I think it would be better to shoot you up with the antibiotics through your pants rather than risk reopening your wound.”

  “Fine,” he agreed as he clearly tried to swallow a gush of his own saliva to help the pills go down his esophagus.

  She discharged the syringe into the tissue of his bottom, and he groaned. “Sure you got the right place?”

  “Yes,” she lied. Then she got out the antiseptic to clean the cuts at his throat. She dabbed at them with a moistened Q-Tip. “Did they tell you I was born on Venus?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “My parents’ highrise apartment was down the street from Hans’ watch store.”

  Desmond’s attention snapped toward her. “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. I used to go there when I was a kid and stare in the window. It was pretty magical in a grown-up fantasy world kind of way... Like staring into steampunk. The shop was new then. Hans was probably in his forties. I think I saw him coming and going from the shop. He wouldn’t have noticed me, though. No one noticed me.”

  “Were you there with your parents?” Desmond asked.

  “No,” she said, finishing with the antiseptic and moving on. She unwrapped the bandages and positioned them over the cuts on Desmond’s neck. “No one would think that a child raised in the penthouse of a highrise wouldn’t have proper attention. My mother died when I was four. My father hired a nanny, but she only worked for us for a few months before she left. That began the trend of hiring nannies that would leave us… That would leave me.”

  “Why did they go?”

  Ornette chuckled. “My father didn’t pay enough. Nannies on the rise would take the job working for him to name-drop him as they tried to get better jobs. By the time I was ten, my father couldn’t pay them anything, so he stopped hiring them. We didn’t have maids. There were robots. They broke, and my father couldn’t pay to replace them. The only reason we weren’t thrown out of the penthouse was that my father owned it utterly. I was alone a lot. The technology in our home kept breaking until I didn’t even have a phone. That was how I ended up on the curb outside the watch store, looking at all the beautiful things they had inside. I had nothing to do, and no one seemed to mind me.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Ornette started packing up the scraps left over from her first aid. Desmond’s hand shot out, and he stopped her hand in mid-motion. “What happened after that?”

  “My father racked up enough debt that he couldn’t pay the fees that every Venecian citizen must pay. He had to sell the apartment, but the price of it couldn’t cover the cost of his debt. He couldn’t afford to keep me anymore. I don’t even know what happened to him. I was sent to Ceres, and I worked in the mines. Thus, I can fly a helocarrier. That’s one of the best jobs for the children on Ceres.”

  Desmond lightened the pressure on her hand and held it warmly. “What was it like there?”

  She shoved her garbage in the tube that accepted garbage with her spare hand. “I lived in a space suit. A person is much safer if they don’t take it off and they’re at their most vulnerable on washing day. One time, I read something about sloths on Earth and how they only came down from their tree once a week to pee. That was a pretty accurate description of how I lived. Except you can pee in your suit all you want. But you have to get out of it from time to time to clean it and to clean yourself. That’s when you’re most vulnerable.”

  “Did you ever get hurt on washing day?” he asked gently.

  She huffed her answer. “Yes, but there are ways to protect yourself when you’re not a newbie. You need to make friends, and you all need to shower together, clean your suits together, swear you’ll never hurt your group, and vow that you will stab anyone who threatens your group.”

  “So, you’ve stabbed people?” he asked incredulously, with wide eyes.

  “I have,” she confirmed gently. “I’ve been stabbed too. It’s better to leave your wound as it is until you can be seen by a real doctor.”

  “How long were you there?” he questioned.

  “Until I was fifteen and old enough to sign a contract with Jewel Girls,” she answered.

  “This story just gets worse and worse. I’m scared to ask, but why did you do that?”

  “When I was transported from Venus to Ceres, the Venician government explained that freeloaders were not allowed on their planet, and if you couldn’t pay their fees, you couldn’t pay for transport off Venus. So, they paid for your transportation to Ceres. You just had to work there until you had paid the transportation fees. But, it’s a trap. They take money off your salary for your food, your housing, your spacesuit, your water, everything. By the time they’ve taken off the expenses you need to live, there is almost nothing to pay for the transportation fees. If you want to leave, you have two options. You either have to have someone come and pay your fees for you, or you have to get a corporation to pay the fees for you, but then your debt just moves to them. It’s a cruel scheme. No company will offer a contract to someone under fifteen, and the only group that would offer anything for a fifteen-year-old girl was Jewel Girls.”

  “Was that as bad as I think it was?” Desmond asked, swallowing more spit.

  Ornette lifted up the seat next to her. She needed to find him a bottle of water, regardless of what he said about swallowing pills dry. The first compartment was empty.

  She had to keep talking. “This is going to sound crazy, but I’m not sure which of the two lives was worse. It was close. I wasn’t regularly sexually exploited on Ceres. It was dark there. It was lonely. Showering with everyone naked made me feel like seeing yet another person naked was no big deal. Generally, I was uncomfortable all the time on Ceres. Sleeping was tough. The food was gross. The work was hard, and it had to be precise. I began to long for clothes, quite desperately.” She looked in the compartment in the second seat. It was also empty.

  “That makes sense,” Desmond agreed.

  He still seemed sympathetic, so she kept talking. “In my contract with Jewel Girls, I was in the sunlight on Earth mostly. I like Earth. I like Earth much more than Ceres. There is just so much more sunlight. I was told over and over again that Ceres is very painful for Venecians because, on Venus, the light is so much stronger. All their slaves come from Venus. Even in their spacesuits, you can hear them cry. On the dwarf planet further from the sun than Mars, they cry.”

  “And the sex?” he asked, cutting across her thoughts about light.

  “It was awful,” she confirmed. “That was when I started forgetting everything that happened to me. That was when I started forgetting my whole day at the end of every day. I even started forgetting my day partway through. I was forgetting breakfast, lunch, dinner, after dinner, where I went to sleep, and more. I’d forget if I went to the bathroom or not. Eventually, I got a lawyer to help me move my contract to Sleeping Beauty Inc.”

  “How was that?”

  “It was better. For starters, at Jewel Girls when they said the girls were working in fashion, they were just playing dress up for their owners. I didn’t get to design clothes or make clothes. I just paraded around in stupid outfits. The owners I got through Sleeping Beauty Inc. actually wanted their models to do work in the fashion industry. Sometimes, I was hired to work in personalized sweatshops. That’s what I did when I worked for Croix. Most of my most recent jobs were working for people with severe disabilities who needed to have clothes altered for them to match their disability.”

  Desmond’s face was warped. “What were you doing when your wrist was burned?”

  “I didn’t get shocked very often when I worked for Jewel Girls. In those cases, I was parading around in dumb outfits, and then I was a punching bag. I was thrown against walls and I had so many head injuries that I was able to opt out of my contract with Jewel Girls. That was what my lawyer argued. It’s not nice to say, but it was my disabled employers that shocked me so many times, they burned my hand permanently. They couldn’t punish me, some of them couldn’t even speak, but they could shock me and they did.”

  She kept checking the seats.

  “There’s no food or water in any of these,” she finally realized.

  Desmond rolled his eyes. “That’s because I’m not supposed to crash and miss the show. I’m supposed to die. That’s why our rupter broke too. Forget the distress call. It probably won’t work anyway.” He started messing with the three bracelets on his wrist. He systematically sent a distress call out with each one. “This one is for my father. This one is for my great-aunt. The last one is for her slave.”

  “Her slave?”

  “She keeps a very talented slave,” Desmond answered with a flat expression.

  He hadn’t finished sending out the last distress call before a hologram poked out of the middle bracelet. It was a woman with white hair, white skin, and navy eyes. She looked as young as an elf. It had to be Silver Ashley. “Desmond, what has happened? You have never called me for help before.”

  “I’m crashed on the surface of Venus. I’ve been stabbed, and the ruptor has burst.”

  “Have you sealed the cockpit?”

  “Yes,”

  “Which helocarrier do you have?”

  “1136.”

  “Have you stopped the bleeding?”

  “I think so.”

  “Are you alone?” Silver Ashley persisted.

  “No. I have Ornette with me,” he said, turning the camera in his bracelet to include Ornette.

  “On the show, they’re telling the audience that she’s sick and so she can’t be bid on this week. That’s what Papa Bear is spewing on Goldilocks Zone right now.”

  “Fine by me,” Desmond groaned.

  “Jellica is telling me that she can’t find your serial code when she scans the planet. Were you just under Nepra when you went down?”

  “Yes,” Ornette relayed.

  “She’ll scan it, looking for the homing beacon in your bracelet. It’ll just take a little more time. Venus is huge, and the cloud cover is thick. She’ll send drones, and then she’ll come get you. How are you for supplies?”

  The conversation went that way until Silver Ashley and Desmond had worked out their rescue.