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“My name is Senior Agent Delvik,” he said, with a smile that seemed to me even more frightening than a frown would have. “You will address me assir, orSenior Agent. Do you understand, girl?”
My lips opened and closed. I clenched my fists with the effort to hold in my pee. I felt my face crumple into a mask of woe. I hoped the man might take it as penitence for my failure to obey him, because I felt desperate to find some way to get from him the boon I so desperately needed.
“Sir…” I started, hearing the strain in my voice. “Sir… I need…”
His smile changed to a frown of apparent confusion. Feeling my cheeks burn, unable to name my mortifying request, I turned to look at the horrible bucket. It was blue; almost the same shade asmy skin. It looked clean, but to my dismay I could detect a whiff of odor now that gave away its purpose.
“Ah,” said Agent Delvik. “Well, girl, you may go ahead, if you answer me, and obey the instruction I gave you before the elders brought you down here.”
I swallowed hard, my brow creasing almost painfully. The tears of shame and terror came back into my eyes. Agent Delvik looked back at me steadily. His little smile had returned as he contemplated my ordeal.
“Otherwise,” he continued, “it seems as if you’re going to have some difficulty—though, really, of course, your new life as a concubine will bring you nothingbutdifficulty if you persist in your disobedience.”
My mouth opened, and I breathed in little gasps, in and out. The agent had spoken so vaguely, and yet my mind had filled with horrifying images. Another stab of agonizing discomfort came from between my legs. I couldn’t help it: I put my hand down there, between my thighs, pressing in a desperate little-girl attempt to keep my pee inside. I watched as Agent Delvik’s smile broadened slightly in obvious appreciation of my dilemma.
“I’ll make it easier for you, Chalondra,” he said, though the tone of his voice suggested that he meant the opposite of what he said. “For the moment, all you must do is remove your dress.”
“Please…” I sobbed. “Please… just let me…”
“I’ll let you relieve yourself,” he said, “once you’ve shown you can do as you’re told. Though I must say that it seems you’re under the impression that I’m going to turn my back, or leave the room, while you use your bucket. I don’t want to leave youwith an incomplete understanding of your position. That sort of privacy isn’t going to be part of your life from this point on.”
“What?” I choked out. I realized to my dismay that he had spoken the truth. Somehow, because ever since I could remember I had, like everyone else I knew, had the expectation of privacy when using the outhouse, I had felt certain I would be allowed it here in my cage—despite all the obvious indications to the contrary.
“Stand up, girl!” the agent said, his voice suddenly very sharp.
My eyes blinked and went wide as I looked at him. I realized to my relief that the pressure of my bladder had eased again at the distraction the agent’s dreadful words had provided. Part of me wanted to obey, out of the rationality and the intelligence I had applied before the elders had left me here. The consequences of disobedience had started to become clear: the pain in my arm from trying to touch the lock had vanished but left its mark in my memory. How could I bear more of that?
But the elders had gone, and they had already taken me from my family. My choices here in this awful basement wouldn’t get them in trouble—the Tri-System Mercantile Company didn’t work that way. To my surprise, I felt my individuality and my sense of independence—my defiant spirit—begin to make a contribution to the confused argument inside my head.
You can’t give in to him. You mustn’t.
The words came into my mouth, straight from my spirit. “Which is it? Do you want me to stand up or do you want me to take off my dress?”
Agent Delvik’s eyes narrowed, but to my horror his smile widened. His expression had become one that I realized, myheart speeding up in alarm, must represent a kind of cruel enjoyment—my defiance pleased him, rather than the reverse. He spoke in a much quieter, but also much more menacing voice.
“I was trying to help you, my dear,” he said. “Sometimes, when I’m preparing good girls, I find that their fear can make them seem disobedient, when in fact they’re merely confused. Telling a good girl to stand up can help get her moving towards the next and more difficult part of an unfamiliar and embarrassing task she must learn to perform without hesitation. Taking off your clothes, of course, represents only the very beginning of your submission to your masters, so it makes a very good starting point, especially when it comes to telling good girls from bad girls like you.”
I swallowed hard. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t take my eyes off his pale face, with its sharply pointed beard and its blue eyes that seemed to look into my mind. I hugged my arms tightly around myself and tried to keep the rebellious expression on my face, the little sneer I had managed to produce when I had spoken so disrespectfully.
Only the very beginning.I knew, from a theoretical point of view, what Vionians did with their concubines. Health and hygiene education didn’t take place in school, on Kamnos, but rather in the family, and traditional Kamnian family values prescribed that boys and girls remained innocent until courtship began at age twenty. My brothers had learned about the changes brought by puberty from our father and our uncles; we girls had learned about it from our mother and our aunts.
I knew that a husband and a wife—or a Vionian master and his concubine, for this much was made clear in school, though in the vaguest possible terms—shared a bed. There, my motherhad told me, they did something together that made the wife pregnant. Because girls remained indoors or very close to the house most of the time, helping with cooking and weaving and vegetable gardening, I had no comparisons to make with the lives of animals and the way calves and piglets came to be, so the question ofwhatexactly a husband and wife did in bed remained a mystery.
I also naturally assumed that a concubine’s purpose on Vion Prime lay in getting pregnant and having Vionian children. I knew that childbirth had a great deal of risk and involved much pain for the mother, so I had, I thought, reasoned out for myself that Vionian women left the thing that happened in bed and the resulting production of children to the concubines.
Friends and siblings whispered that husbands and wives didn’t have their clothes on when they did the bed-thing. That seemed strange, but my mind had connected the fact automatically to Agent Delvik’s ordering me to take off my clothes. I had supposed, I realized as I tried to define the meaning of his terrifying words, that he wished to carry out some sort of inspection to verify my suitability for the bed-thing, whatever it might be.
The idea of being naked in front of the agent had seemed terribly embarrassing on its own. Part of my mother’s education in hygiene had, as it did for all Kamnian girls, involved instilling what she called a feminine modesty in me. That, too, had always seemed to go along with what happened between husband and wife: from puberty a girl kept her body hidden from the eyes of all others—especially men. The bed-thing clearly represented a sort of secret, just like a girl’s body in a dress.
The news the agent had just delivered, however, seemed to speak of things that went well beyond having to show the secrets of mynewly blossomed body to a man I had never met before today. I had to work very hard even to keep my face from twisting into a pleading pout as the fear and embarrassment swept through me—embarrassment as much at having no idea what the man was even talking about as at being called a bad girl, or at the thought of undressing with him watching.
A stab of discomfort from my bladder, so severe that it brought a whimper to my lips, called me from my thoughts. I felt my face yield to the torment and the humiliation, the corners of my mouth turning down and my brow furrowing. I closed my eyes, tears leaking out from under the lids. I had to unfold my arms so that I could push with both hands as I tried to keep the pee inside.
“Very well,” I heard Agent Delvik say. “We’ll do this the hard way.”
I opened my eyes and raised them, my heart pounding wildly. I saw him pick up the handheld from the table and touch something on the screen, and then I felt a sudden, terrible discomfort between my thighs. The warning I had gotten from the lock now seemed to focus inside my pussy, as if someone had put a red-hot iron bar there. I screamed in agony, and because it seemed like it might lessen the agony, I stood up, though I couldn’t straighten my limbs out because of the sheer intensity of the pain.
Tears gushed from my eyes and down my cheeks as I looked through the bars at the agent, standing calmly there with his finger on the little screen. I hopped from one foot to the other in the vain hope of easing the agony.
