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“I…” Silverstar started, but she seemed unable to continue.
The girl whose service name seemed almost as cruel as my own, Heartarse, seemed to know what Silverstar had meant to say.
“What did he mean,” she asked timidly. “About… you know… about not being a… a virgin?”
I could see on Halana’s face that she had expected the question. Her cheeks had gone pink before Heartarse had even finished asking it.
“I’m not,” she said, clearly trying to make her voice sound proud and defiant. “I… was… with… a boy I liked. A few weeks ago.”
I frowned, and I could see similar expressions of puzzlement on the faces of the other three girls. Lot three, whose service name I didn’t remember, said, “You werewithhim? Like, you took a walk with him?”
In my village, boys and girls didn’t have the chance to do that sort of thing. If I had tried for some reason to sneak away from my house to the fields to go for a walk with a boy, I would undoubtedly have ended up not being allowed to go anywhere with my friends for a month.
Halana’s face had turned an even deeper shade of red. She had fixed her eyes on the ground, but I thought I could still see some rebellion in them, as if she knew she should feel shame—and shedidfeel shame—but at the same time she didn’t actually regret whatever she had done with the boy.
“We did what husbands and wives do,” she said. “In bed. It’s called…” She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “Fucking.”
I looked around at the others, my own cheeks burning. The agents had used that word, hadn’t they? They had made it clear thatfuckingwas one of the things our owners would do to us. One of the things they wouldenjoydoing to us. One of the reasons they had bought us.
“Wetquim,” I heard a woman’s voice say. “Come over here, please.”
My attention had been seized so thoroughly by the alarming conversation with Halana that at first I didn’t even remember thatWetquimrepresented my name. I simply kept looking at her, hoping and fearing at the same time that she would say more about fucking.
“Wetquim,” Silverstar whispered urgently.
I looked up at her, still not associating the terrible word with myself until I saw from her expression that she could only be trying to warn me.
“Wetquim,” said the feminine voice again, from behind me, more urgently, and indeed, I understood only at the last millisecond, in a tone of warning. Then my pussy exploded with pain.
I cried out and turned, and I saw both of them standing on the other side of the corral’s low fence: the baron and the mistress, looking at me intently. I felt my knees buckle and my arms struggle desperately against the metal cuffs, trying in vain toget them loose so I could clutch my pussy, the only thing that seemed to soothe the agony of the punisher at all, as shameful as it seemed to hold myself that way.
But the pain vanished as soon as I had turned. It had gone on a much shorter time than it had lasted on any previous occasion when the agents had punished me for inattention or disobedience. I straightened up, and then I realized I had my eyes raised to look at them, the man who owned me and the woman who, it seemed, worked for him to… what?
To train me. I felt my face pucker with mortification as I realized what her work must entail. She had a handheld in her hand. She had activated the punisher: part of training a bed girl obviously lay in getting her to pay attention when her mistress calls her.
I lowered my eyes. Out of sheer relief that she had stopped the agony, I walked towards where in my limited field of vision I could see their feet—the baron’s in deep red leather shoes, the mistress’ in simple ones of the same sort of cloth her dress seemed made of, with synthetic rubber soles.
“I’m sorry I had to do that,” her voice said, once I had come within half a meter of the fence. “But it’s important we begin as we mean to go on. Now, what is your real name?”
I blinked. For a moment I thought I couldn’t have heard her correctly, since the question seemed to go against everything I had experienced of the Vionians so far.
“Wetquim,” the baron said. His voice was so deep, the deepest voice I thought I had ever heard. It couldn’t actually have shaken me through its rumbling vibration, but it felt to me like it did. “Answer your new mistress. What is your Kamnian name?”
“Ch—Chalondra,” I stammered.
“Chalondra, Master,” the mistress said. “Try again, please.”
My lips parted. My breath passed in and out in fearful pants. I could feel the eyes of the other concubines on me. Another one had joined us, from the block, right after the mistress had spoken my new name… which wasn’t my new name, because they had asked for my real name? Confusion pressed in from every direction. Why was I the only girl whose new owner had come to the corral?
What had the mistress said?Try again, please? Try what again? I had lost the thread completely.
“I’m waiting, Chalondra,” the baron said. He spoke the words as a simple, factual utterance, rather than with a threat, but I could tell he wouldn’t hesitate to tell the mistress to punish me if he found the answer unsatisfactory.Master.He wasn’t merely my owner. This man meant to be much more than that to me.
“Chalondra, Master,” I said. I felt a surge of perverse pride in having figured out what they required, and strange as it seemed, I found a spark of spirit rising in my chest. I felt as if I had started to understand the system that had bound me, and the man who through that system had acquired me as his possession.
“Good girl,” said the mistress. “As I think you’ve probably gathered, Chalondra, this is your new master, Baron Gravamir. I am Mistress Franla. You will call memistress. Do you understand?”
I blew a breath through my nostrils. For a fraction of a second, I found myself considering whether to give the required answer or to show that I had recovered some of the defiance that had gotten me paddled so painfully in the basement of the villagehouse, half a galaxy away. The feel of the metal cuffs around my wrist and the threat of the device in Mistress Franla’s hand made me think better of it.
