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Chapter 2
The collection floor needed to be clinically clean.
That was the first step covered in training, before even entering the room. Violet underlined the heading in her training binder, adding stars to either side of the bold-faced lettering, in an effort to emphasize the importance in her mind.Collection Floor. Clinically Clean.
“You just want to follow the steps, it’s really that simple. Keep the workspace clean, it makes it easier for the next tech and keeps the day moving. You don’t want to fall behind because someone else didn’t call for a clean-up, because once you’re behind you’ll be behind all afternoon. Don’t be the tech who throws off someone’s whole day.”
She had arrived that morning with a twist in her guts and what felt like sand coating her tongue, the same sort of nausea-inducing anxiety she’d always suffered from with every new class, new club, new experience. The pressure of being a perfectionist, the unarticulated terror of not being an automatic expert . . . it would pass, she knew, but that never calmed her jangling nerves or settled her stomach at the time.
When she’d made the drive to Cambric Creek the morning of her first visit to the farm, she’d been too focused on following the unfamiliar directions, turning when the smooth-accented AI said to turn. Now that the route was a bit more familiar, she’d found herself gazing out the window as she navigated her way through the picturesque town square with its gazebo and waterfall and expansive, green park. Shops and restaurants lined Main Street: bistros and boutiques, an occultist beside a shop with brightly colored stained glass windows, an interesting-looking bookshop and a nail salon boasting a promotion on “talon dips.” The rich scent of coffee teased at her nose when she stopped at a light, coming from a wide-windowed storefront with black awnings and curling white lettering, and her stomach growled. Violet had a feeling it would be of a higher quality brew than the seventy-eight-cent gas station latte in her cup holder, a daily indulgence that she poured into a floral tumbler so that she appeared to be sipping one of the craft beverages from the chain near her apartment.Better quality and probably a whole lot more expensive.
A family of mothpeople had crossed the street before her as she idled in front of the town’s central square the morning of her first scheduled shift, a couple with two small children. As she watched, the roly-poly baby was tossed in the air by the bespectacled mothman, peals of squealing infant laughter meeting her ears through the open window as the flailing bundle was caught. There had been a mothman that lived on her floor in the city for a short time, tall and slender and strangely attractive, with lovely smoke-colored wings and impossibly long fingers, but he’d kept to himself, his giant eyes lowering on the rare occasion they passed in the hallway, and she’d never worked up the nerve to speak to him. She’d watched as the couple reached the opposite sidewalk, where they were greeted by a petite goblin, clutching the hand of her own small, green-skinned child.This is a nice place.The thought had come to her unbidden, but the moment it crossed her mind, she had known it was true.This is a nice place, and they wouldn’t have a business that wasn’t completely on the up-and-up operating right out in the open.
“Everything you need is right here, so it’s super simple. There’s no uniform to buy, the scrubs are in the locker room. You just need to drop them in the laundry cart at the end of each shift, and you can change them throughout the day if you need to. There’s nothing you need to buy, nothing you need to bring. Oh! You’ll get a water bottle once you start, I keep mine in my locker so I don’t forget it. That’s really it! You just need to make sure you’re following protocol with the clipboards and client labels and leave the rooms in the same condition you found them. Cleaning checks the sprayers every night, so you never have to worry about being out of something . . . it really is an easy job once you get into the groove of things!”
There were color-coded spray bottles containing different sanitizers on the wall outside of the collection room doorway: purple for the breeding bench, scented like oranges; green for the collection floor, with a strong, industrial odor. The scent did not linger, the girl assured her, drawing her attention to the mop clipped beside the sprayers. The bench needed to be sprayed down after each client left the room, and the floor given a cursory mop. If there was abigger messto clean—that bit relayed with a conspiratorially cocked eyebrow—she was to punch in the cleaning code into the keypad in the hallway, and flip over the red circle on the door before leaving, a signal to the janitorial associate who would respond and a warning for the next technician that the room was not ready for clients.
Violet nearly turned the same shade that her name implied when her brain caught up with what was implied bya bigger mess,before locating the instruction in her binder and drawing a rectangle around the four-digit code that would call for janitorial aid.How often doesthathappen? Am I going to need to wear galoshes?
“It’s not that common an occurrence,” the other woman continued as if she was able to divine thoughts. Violet had initially thought her to be another human, but the longer she spent trailing after the upbeat employee, the more she understood that her assumption was in error. The woman’s wide, dark eyes were just that—wide and dark; a solid, inky pupil that bled into an iris of the same color, with no white sclera to break up the doll-like effect. She wore the uniform’s surgical cap over her dark hair, but as the afternoon went on, Violet was able to make out twinned protrusions at her hairline, poking against the thin batting of the elastic cap, either horns or antennae, she deduced.
“It might happen once or twice in these early days, but you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly. The clients get upset if any of their collection is wasted, ya know? Every drop on the floor is a drop they’re not getting paid for, and you’re not going to want to deal with the mess . . . let’s just say it’s averygood incentive to not be slow with the nozzle.”
She nodded, frantically scribbling notes in the margins of the training binder she clutched, despite the fact that each page featured brightly colored illustrations and step-by-step instructions. She’d always been a frantic note-taker in school, missing half the lecture in her haste to write down every single innocuous-sounding detail, and found herself slipping back into the bad habit now, in this strange place, in this strange town. The collection floor needed to be clinically clean; anything less and the bottles might be compromised, and there was nothing more important than the white-filled bottles, sloshing in their old-fashioned wire carriers.
“Hooking up the machine is the most intimidating part of the process, but it’s really easy once you get the hang of it. You just want to make sure you’re not cutting any corners now because when you’re slammed in two months going from client to client, you’ll be running on pure muscle memory, ya know? It’s important to learn to do things the right way in the beginning.”
Her throat seemed to seize as she swallowed, nearly choking at the girl’s words.How could she think that?! The machine . . . who cares about the stupid machine!She’d been walked through the laundry facility, shown where the employee locker room was and where to find extra scrubs; led through the process of picking up her assigned rooms for the day and now a tour of the collection rooms themselves . . . but they’d still not covered the main aspect of the job, and Violet felt the reality of what would be expected of her sitting in the corner of the room like some great, hulking, horned shadow. The paper face mask evidently hid her exasperated expression, and the other woman turned away cheerfully, swinging open the door to the collection floor.
A circular work area lay ahead, anchored by the milking apparatus in the center of the room. A low bank of coolers and an empty table which would be filled with clipboards, were the room in use. A rack of shiny, chrome cylinders rested beside the table—the collection tanks, Violet understood immediately. Old-fashioned glass bottles, the kind she’d seen in roadside country stores and the most perverse detail of the farm’s aesthetic, in her opinion, sat in neat lines on a shelf above an autoclave which they were to be sterilized within before being loaded into the machine. She did her best to pay attention, noting how the autoclave was started and the way the collection tanks were hooked into the milking machine and how she connected the hoses. Violet supposed the mechanical aspect to the job might, in fact, be intimidating, particularly the speed with which she was expected to execute the set-up . . . but she found herself surreptitiously glancing upwards every few seconds, her eyes finding the hole in the bench above her head every time her training partner turned away.
The collection floor sat half-a-level below the area the clients entered, a short staircase granting the collection associates access to the upper part of the room. The bench, from what she could see of it, reminded her of the twenty-minute massage chairs in the center of the mall back home, which self-consciousness had always kept her from patronizing. The bench above her had a similar design: a padded headrest and armrests, cannily placed braces for the sitter’s legs to rest against, and a wide support for the torso. It was tipped forward at a more extreme angle, and the sheer size of the thing gave hint to the tremendous stature of the clients who would be resting there. The main differences were the thick upholstery cushioning . . . and, of course, the hole. Placed in the center of the bench’s front supports, the opening gave clear access to the technician on the lower level, just before the chrome machinery in the center of the workspace, identical to those used on traditional dairy farms.
Violet wondered, as her hand reached out to lift one of the milking machine’s nozzles, if the minotaurs would be able to see her below them as she worked, or if she would be completely hidden from view. Her mortification at the thought was, thankfully, well-disguised. She’d been worried that the cow-print apron and short-sleeved top worn by the technician in the video was the actual uniform, but reality proved to be much more sterile: the provided nursing scrubs were worn with a surgical cap, an isolation mask that covered the majority of her face, and sterile gloves. She had breathed a sigh of relief as she caught sight of herself in the reflection of the glass wall outside the locker room that morning—her identity was indecipherable.
The circumference of the nozzle in her hand was larger than that of a soda can, her fingers barely able to stretch around it, her nails not quite meeting as she lifted it for inspection. A silky interior met her fingers, highly textured medical-grade silicone, filled with bumps and nodules and ridges. Her training partner flipped the chrome-plated switch at the side of the collection unit then, and the machine whirred to life. Violet watched the hydraulic arm begin to move, pistoning up and down, causing the nozzle in her hand to buzz and hum, the percussive thump of the motor seeming to match the sudden pounding of her heart.
“Once you’ve got the tanks hooked into place and the client situated . . . ” the other girl began, shrugging as Violet looked up. She was able to see the smile in the other woman’s eyes, despite the paper mask that covered the majority of her face. “You just get to work. It’s as easy as flipping a switch.”
Her hand moved over the opening, fingers pressing into the silky-smooth interior once more, catching on the nodules within until she felt the suction of the machine, a rhythmic tightening, inhaling her fingers into the mouth of the nozzle. The light that came from above would be blotted out, she realized, when a hulking body covered the bench above her, the glow from the upper level currently afforded by the hole in the bench plugged with turgid male flesh, leaving her in shadow to handle the sucking nozzles below. The implications of the machine, of the pistoning suction, the interior texture and nodules, thesizeof the cylinder in her hand, the hole in the bench above her head . . . blood pounded in her ears and the room pitched, and Violet staggered away from the circular work area, gasping for air her lungs felt as though they’d been inexplicably deprived, as the trainer clicked the machine off.
“I know it’s a lot,” the other woman called out, once more seeming to discern her thoughts. “The clean-up, the machines, the checklists— it’s all to remind us that this is a normal job, ya know? It’s not any different than working at the blood banks or the organ trade-in places. Some facilities extract venom from snake people to make medicines, we extract this. It’s no different.”
She straightened, sucking in a long breath, wondering what kind of establishment traded in organs before shaking the unsettling thought away and pushed back her shoulders. “R-right. It’s definitely not sex work.”
“It’s not, technically,” the other woman went on, eyeing Violet dubiously. “There’s a sexual element in it for the clients, obviously, and that’s not even true for all of them. Some of them are just here to get paid. But . . . humans have a, let’s saydifferentview on what you call ‘sex work’ than a lot of us do. There are a lot of species that go through seasonal heats, did you know that? It’s not just being horny, it’s a medical handicap. Not everyone has the luxury of having someone at home to help them get through it. Being a heat helper is a real job, you know, and a lucrative one. ‘Seasonal assistance positions,’ they’re called. There’s a sexual element to it for the client in need of assistance, but it’s more like . . . home health care, I guess. You’ll see soon enough, it’s not sexual forus, not any more than drawing blood is. Do you need to take a breather?”
No different than drawing blood. You’re going to be good at this.“No, I-I’m fine. What’s next?”
The girl eyed her speculatively for a long moment, the foreign appendages on her head twitching beneath the paper cap.Definitely antennae.Her doll-like eyes crinkled as she smiled before nodding. “Yep, I think you will be. C’mon, let’s take a fifteen, you can grab a snack from the vending machines. Then we’ll start some rotations, okay?”
The goal for every client is a plentiful, speedy collection.Violet felt her insides turn to jelly at the thought of seeing the collection process live in person already, but she squared her shoulders once more, nodding. She could do this. “Sounds good to me, I’m ready for it.”
* * *
She was not, in fact, ready for it.
The first client of the day had been a towering minotaur of at least seven feet, and she’d gaped at the sight of him gazing down from the room’s upper level, lazily pumping the erection that jutted from the opening of his pants, grateful for the mask she wore. His expression was cocky as he turned to undress fully before straddling the breeding bench, smirking over the side at the antennaed girl’s announcement that a trainee would be observing that day.
