He’d said that his aim was to protect one woman and her child, but as the conversation continued, it was becoming clear that it was going to involve a lot more than that. Presumably, he’d given me the short version because he didn’t want me knowing all the various details. I couldn’t even be offended by that. I hadn’t done anything to prove myself trustworthy in the last day or so, and if this project involved complicated politics with Vangal and the Ranzors, he was likely of the opinion that the less I knew, the better.
Once the kitchen was clean, Kade turned to me. “I need to show you how to run the washing machine, but would you like me to show you how to clean the rest of the house? How to order groceries, what the usual routines are?” He looked sceptical as he asked the question, and I once again felt a trickle of regret. Kade had started out so friendly yesterday, and I was doing everything in my power to hold him at a distance.
But if this played out anything like the way I expected it to, then Kade could not be a true friend to me anyway. He would follow his master’s lead, chew me up and spit me out when he was done with me. The longing for a friend was a far different reality from what was currently in front of me.
I thought about being difficult… but in the end, my master was going to order me to help Kade, whether I liked it or not. Was it defeatist to make that choice before he could order me to do it? Or was it just good sense in choosing my battles? “Yes,” I said finally, though I made sure I didn’t sound enthusiastic about it.
We spent the next several hours working through the various chores around the house – laundry, cleaning the bathroom, vacuuming the floors. Meanwhile, my master made call after call, talking to various people in the military and checking up on the other dimari who had arrived in the same crate as me.
That last responsibility struck me as a little odd. The new dimari were the responsibility of their own masters. Why did my master need to get involved in how they were treating their slaves? I kept half an ear on the conversation as we went about our work, trying to piece the information together. There were half a dozen small details that caught my attention, largely connected to the idea that the new owners didn’t know much about how the dimari were trained. Given that I’d been taught almost nothing about the Alliance, I supposed it wasn’t such an odd thing that the masters here might not know a great deal about the dimari, either.
Eventually, my master’s voice fell silent, and a few minutes later, Kade declared that we were finished with our housework. We returned to the kitchen to find my master tapping a written message into his comm. He stared intently at the screen until a reply popped up, then he sighed in what seemed to be relief. “Okay, I’d like both of you to put on some suitable clothes. We’re going for a walk into town.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
AIDEN
“Idon’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” I blurted out, aware that I must look quite stricken, given the way Bryce was frowning at me. “He isnothinglike any other dimari I’ve ever met. He’s belligerent and disobedient, and none of the management techniques I’ve spent a whole year teaching to the other dimari owners has the slightest effect.”
Bryce was one of my closest friends, and he also worked for the Alliance military, though he was a major, while I was a mere commander. We were seated in a café near the river, while I’d sent Kade and Jai to have a look around the town. I’d asked Kade to show Jai all the important landmarks – the supermarket, the gym, the post office – and given Jai an explicit order to follow Kade’s instructions, on condition that Kade didn’t contradict any orders I’d already given Jai. The pair of them had wandered off, both of them looking rather apprehensive about the idea, leaving me to fret over how much of a disaster this excursion was going to be.
“There’s a part of me that’s very, very glad that I adopted him, rather than anyone else,” I said to Bryce, “because if someoneelse had told me he was behaving the way he is, I’d have refused to believe them. I would have told them, with full confidence and steadfast belief in myself, that they were doing something wrong, and if they would just follow the manual, everything would be fine. And from where I’m standing now, I can see that that’s blatantly untrue.”
I was aghast, not so much at Jai’s behaviour, but at my own naivety. I was right back to the beginning of everything I’d thought I knew about the dimari, feeling like a newborn colt stumbling about on wobbly legs.
“Okay, okay,” Bryce said, holding up a hand in a placatory way. “First of all, take a deep breath. I’m serious. Deep breath,” he prompted me, when I didn’t respond. I did as he asked, managing to relax a little into my chair. “And now, you’re going to tell me more about exactly what’s been going on. I’ve spent the past two years listening to you rant about the dimari and how bloody stubborn some of their owners have been. We’re going to work this out. You just need someone with a bit more distance from it than you’ve got right now.”
I took another breath, feeling the tension in my shoulders loosen, and I nodded. “Okay, so it started when we first got him out of the crate…” I spent a solid twenty minutes going through all the details – Jai’s insistence on remaining black, his unwillingness to follow routines, his ongoing disobedience, and the horrifying display in the shower. And closely related to that, his non-admission that his trainers had done something traumatising to him in the process of training him to be an erotic companion.
“I don’t think it’s the erotic companion training in general,” I explained. “I think it’s something specific they did to Jai. I spoke to Torry this morning. She’s part of the triad that adopted Nol, the other erotic companion. And she’s reported that Nol is as happy as a pig in mud. He very willingly had sex with her thenight they got home, he’s had one-on-one time with both of the other two, and she said that this weekend, they’re going to try a group thing. Nol’s displaying no distress, no signs of trauma, no reluctance whatsoever. I haven’t had a whole lot of experience with other erotic companions, and certainly none that are newly arrived. Mostly I’ve been fixing problems between owners and dimari who have already been living together for months, which plays out a bit differently from new arrivals.”
Bryce nodded slowly, as I finally ran out of steam. We’d found a quiet corner of the cafe, which wasn’t too busy at the moment, given that it was a Friday and most people were still at work. But even so, I’d had to keep my voice down in describing some of the things that had happened in the last couple of days. “Well, a fair bit of that sounds pretty bad. And we all know the Eumadians are bastards. Have you managed to find out any more about Jai’s training? Specifically what they got him to do as an erotic companion?”
“No, not yet,” I said. “He totally freaked out when I asked if they’d ever hurt him, and I haven’t dared to push it any more since then. I looked at his operations manual, but that hasn’t been any help. I can see the list of skills he was trained in, but it’s not significantly different from any other erotic companion.”
“Hmm,” Bryce said, as he thought it over, and I was once again grateful that he was such a steady and sensible man. He was taking the time to consider this deeply, rather than dismissing my concerns. “Let’s go back to first principles. When you met Kade, you didn’t have a clue what to do with him. But a lot of the answers you found were based on indications Kade himself gave you about what he wanted. He seduced you in the shower. He leapt willingly into battle and killed both Culrads and Geshtoch. Then, a bit later on, he clearly displayed that he was very much not okay with the idea that you were not his original intended master, and that was a problem you hadto work through together. So essentially, you need to do the same thing with Jai. He’s already showing you certain things that he doesn’t like. And you’ve already proven with Kade that you’re very perceptive when it comes to the subtle nuances of dimari behaviour. As Jai gradually learns to trust you, he should become more willing to show you how he’s feeling.”
I shook my head. “But that’s the main problem at the moment. Hedoesn’ttrust me. Not even slightly. Kade practically jumped me the first time I took a shower with him. Jai recoiled like I was trying to strap him to a hot stove.”
Bryce tilted his head as he continued to watch me. “If I may play devil’s advocate for a moment, are you saying that dimari shouldn’t be refusing to consent to sex?”
“No, of course not,” I snapped, then rolled my eyes. He’d just warned me that he was playing devil’s advocate, and I’d jumped to the defensive anyway. “Sorry,” I muttered.
Bryce grinned at me. “Most dimari consent on a regular basis, even if not every single time. So in this case, Jai did not consent, and you responded appropriately, by stopping your attempts at sexual activity. So far, so good. Furthermore, you’ve said yourself multiple times that in the early stages of a relationship, the dimari themselves do not understand that they have the choice to consent or not, and that they’re not yet aware that their masters will respect their attempts to very politely suggest that perhaps now isn’t an ideal time to be bumping uglies. Which also fits with Jai. He’d only met you that day, he was not aware that he could say no, and yet, due to his apparent trauma with his training, he did not want to have sex with you. Forgive me if this sounds flippant, but none of this sounds all that different from all the things you’ve been teaching the other masters.”
“Some of it’s not. But there are two significant differences here. The first is that Jai’s an erotic companion. He’s been specifically trained to perform a variety of sexual activities, sothe fact that he doesn’t want to is concerning. And secondly, sex is the primary reward for a dimari. How do I reward him if the single most important reward is something he doesn’t want a bar of? The whole project for the past year and a half started with the realisation that if dimari don’t get rewarded with sex, they get depressed and commit suicide. So with Jai, I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
Bryce raised an eyebrow. “And yet you also have a magical way with words. You’ve asked Kade a multitude of questions that he shouldn’t have been able to answer, and yet you still manage to get answers, because instead of asking him ‘Do you like this?’, you ask things like, ‘What are the usual expectations of a dimari about this?’ or ‘What did your training teach you about this?’ It might take a bit of messing about to find the right combination of words, but you’ve had plenty of experience with that.”
“In some ways, yes, I totally agree with you,” I said, not quite daring to gather any optimism yet. “But I asked him why he’d been given two specialties instead of one, and specifically what characteristics had led to him being chosen as an erotic companion. He said he didn’t know. No prevaricating, no hedging his bets. He just said he had no idea. Based on what Kade’s always said, the dimari should have a basic understanding of the personality traits required for each specialty.”
That got another frown from Bryce. “Wait, hold up… hedoesn’t knowwhy he was trained as an erotic companion? That makes no sense.”
“I asked him why he was trained in two skills, and apparently he was some kind of wonder child who finished his combat training two years early. Typical gifted child shit, he’s performed well so far, so we’re just going to dump more responsibility on him. But why erotic companion, when he seems to have no affinity for it?”
Bryce stared blankly at the table top for a long moment, and I forced myself to sit quietly and wait. He was something of a strategic genius, and if anyone could figure out what the Eumadians had been up to, Bryce would be it.
Eventually, he lifted his head. “I have a theory on that. And it is only a theory. But it would also fit with not only everything we know about the Eumadians, but everything we currently know about Jai. Consider this: Not all that long ago, the Eumadians were entirely willing to fry Kade’s brain by trying to force him to bond to a different master. They knew it wouldn’t work, but ultimately, someone paid them a big pile of money to try. So maybe this is the same thing. They knew they couldn’t train one dimari in two skills. They knew Jai shouldn’t be an erotic companion. But if someone paid them enough money, they would have done it anyway. How much was he sold for, by the way?”
