“So you brought her to Wenn’s to have her collar removed, he gave you some work to do first, and when you came out she was gone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did Wenn know ahead of time that you’d be bringing her this evening?”
“I had told him I was planning to, sir, but we didn’t say what day. It all came up at the last minute.”
“Did he know anything else about her? Her age or appearance?”
“Yes, sir. He asked me how old she was and what she looked like.”
“I see.” The officer sighed. “Well, what was she wearing when she disappeared?”
Bensin frowned, trying to remember. “I gave her my jacket, sir. It’s light brown.”
“What else? Pants? Shorts? Shirt? A dress?”
“She doesn’t have any dresses.” He chewed on his lip. “I guess she probably had shorts and a T-shirt on, just ’cause that’s what she usually wears. But I don’t remember for sure.”
“What about shoes?”
“Hmm. I guess she was wearing her flip-flops. No, wait, they probably would have come off when we were running. Her sneakers, then, maybe.”
“What color?”
“Um — I think they’re sort of a dirty gray. She got them used.”
“All right, just a moment.” The officer got up, taking his notebook with him, and disappeared out the door.
This time the wait was longer. Bensin sat there, shivering in the air conditioning and feeling his sore spots throb. There was no clock in the room, but he guessed that a quarter of an hour had passed by the time the man returned.
“Well, I’ve done what I can.” He seated himself across from Bensin again. “It turns out the Creghorns called the Watch a few hours back when they realized she was missing. They didn’t remember what she was wearing either, though a man who was with them did. Denim shorts that reached halfway to her knees, a faded pink T-shirt with grass stains on it, dirty gray sneakers with white socks, and hair tied back in a ponytail with a rubber band. That sound about right?”
“Yes, sir; I guess so.” For some reason it made Bensin mad that that creepy man remembered so many details about his sister’s appearance.
“Ellie’s case is not unique, unfortunately,” the officer went on. “There are unscrupulous people out there who pretend they are willing to help slaves; and sometimes they actually do. But if the circumstances are right, many of them instead capture and resell them on the black market. I had just clocked out when I heard you were here, so technically I’m not even at work right now and there’s not much I can do personally. But I’ve updated the original report with your information, and a couple of our officers on duty are going to try to find Wenn and track her down. Try not to worry,” he added, seeing Bensin’s expression. “We’ve dealt with cases like this before.”
“And — and do you always find the slaves they took, sir?”
“Not always,” the officer admitted. “But often. There are certain places we know to look, certain people and businesses we keep an eye on. I passed on everything you told me, and I’ll be sure to let you know what we find.” He folded his hands and fixed Bensin with a stern look. “In the meantime, there are other things you and I need to discuss.”
Bensin felt his stomach tighten. He had known this would be coming. “Y-yes, sir?”
“How much did you pay Wenn to have Ellie’s collar removed?”
What was the point in lying? He swallowed. “T-two thousand imps, sir.”
“What about the money in the envelope that was in your pocket?”
“That was mine, sir, from what I earned working for you, plus some of my prize money from placing in tournaments. My owner lets me keep ten percent. What was in the envelope was left over from paying Wenn.”
“You didn’t earn two thousand forty in my yard or from tournaments. Where did you get the rest?”
Bensin bit his lower lip and stared down at his cuffed wrists. He swallowed again. “From — I — I took it from my owner, sir.”
There was silence in the cold little room for a long moment. Silence in which Bensin’s own guilt and shame screamed at him more loudly than words. He had robbed Coach Steene, who had been kinder to him than any other free person ever had — and for what? To pay a criminal who had stolen away his sister. Bensin hated himself. It would almost be a relief to be lashed. He deserved it; deserved worse than anything the Watch could possibly do to him. I won’t even cover my mouth this time, he told himself. Crying out in pain, screaming even, would be an appropriate outlet for the feelings that were building inside him.
To his surprise, Officer Shigo stood up, took a key out of his pocket, and unlocked the steel band fastening Bensin’s handcuffs to the table. Fishing through the keys on his ring, he chose a different one and unlocked the cuffs from around his wrists. “All right, get up.”
Last time they had lashed him right here in this room. Why was he being taken elsewhere now?
“I’m going to drive you home,” the officer told him, sensing his confusion.
Home? “Home, sir? But — aren’t you going to —”
“To lash you? No, I’m not. For one thing, I think you’re being punished enough already. For another, witnesses confirmed that you didn’t start the fight and that you were only defending yourself against a jealous kid who’d had one too many drinks. Not that you shouldn’t have just walked away, but I think your reaction was understandable, under the circumstances. And for another thing, I was off duty when I found out about your other crimes, which were not the reason you were brought in anyway.” He smiled at Bensin’s expression. “Yes, there are cracks in the system. Congratulations, you just slipped through one of them. Now come with me, and I’ll drop you off on my way home. Your owner can decide how to deal with the other issues.” He guided Bensin out of the room and down the hall with a hand on his shoulder.
In the lobby, they stopped by the front desk. “Before I head out, I’ll just finish up the paperwork on Bensin, here,” the officer said to the woman behind it.
“Here you go.” She handed him a sheet of paper and pen. “Shall I call his owner now?”
“No need. I know his owner; I’ll just take him home myself. It’s on my way, more or less. Could you get the things he had on him when he was brought in?”
She disappeared through a doorway, and Bensin watched as the officer wrote something on the paper, checked some boxes, turned the sheet over, wrote a little more, and signed his name at the bottom.
The woman returned with the plastic bag bearing Bensin’s possessions. Sliding the sheet back to her, Officer Shigo took the bag in exchange, opened it, and handed Bensin its contents. Bidding her goodnight, he led the way out to the parking lot.
“Please, sir,” Bensin began when they were outside. “Couldn’t I go back out there and — well — and look for Ellie, or — or help the officers track her down, or something? If she’s hiding somewhere, she’ll be scared to come out for strangers. If I was there, it would be different.”
“If you want permission to go out again tonight, you’ll have to get it from your owner. It will need to be Steene’s decision at this point.” The officer led him not to a Watch car but to the silver one Bensin washed for him almost every Monday. “In you go.”
Bensin sat in the front seat, staring out into the night as they drove through the city. Ellie was out there somewhere. Officers were looking for her, but would they find her in time?
“Sir,” he began, “when people like Wenn steal slaves, what do they do with them? They don’t hurt them, do they? They just sell them to someone else?”
“It depends.”
“On …?” He was afraid to hear the answer, but he had to know.
“A variety of factors. On whether the slave puts up a fight, for one, though a scared little five-year-old isn’t likely to do much of that. Usually they pass them on to a middleman, who transports them somewhere else and sells them with a fake ID tag and sometimes a different name. The
y usually never get registered at a slave office, so they’re out of the system. How they get treated after that depends on what the new owner wanted them for in the first place. If the slaves cooperate, sometimes they aren’t harmed, at least not any more than an average slave is harmed by his owner.” He glanced over at Bensin, his face sober. “I won’t lie to you, though. People who make those kinds of black market deals are not usually moral, upstanding citizens.”
Bensin swallowed hard. “Do — do you think Ellie would have already been sold to someone like that?”
“It’s possible, but probably not. She may be en route at the moment, but it can take time to make these arrangements. If Wenn didn’t know she’d be coming tonight, there probably wasn’t a chance to set everything up ahead of time. The middleman might be keeping her somewhere until he can find a prospective buyer. Sometimes these people deal with more than one slave at once, and they wait until they have enough of them to make a trip to another city worthwhile.”
“Another city?” Bensin had never left Jarreon before, and neither had Ellie. The thought of her being taken to another city, even one in Imperia, was alarming. She might as well be shipped off to some province at the other end of the empire.
“Wenn did ask if she was cute,” he recalled. Maybe he knew of a particular buyer out there who wanted cute little girls. Like the guy at the Creghorns’ house. The thought made him clench his fists in anger and worry.
But Bensin knew a lot of people wanted older slaves, strong teenagers or adults for hard physical labor, like Ricky’s owner with his construction company. “I wonder why they didn’t take me too.”
“You?” The officer chuckled. “Have you looked in a mirror lately? I don’t know too many unarmed crooks who’d want to tangle with a warrior like you singlehandedly. Quite likely Wenn was planning to come back later with some of his cronies, or a gun, or both.”
“Then if I hadn’t gotten out of there when I did, I might have ended up with Ellie after all.” I’m so stupid. He should have stayed put. Then they would have taken him wherever they had taken his sister, and he would have been with her right now to help her escape.
“Possibly,” Officer Shigo agreed. “But you probably wouldn’t have been able to do much. You’d both be sitting in the trunk of a car or some dark closet or abandoned building with duct tape over your mouths waiting to be sold to different people in different places. Your sister is a lot more likely to get help because you got away and reported what happened.”
Officer Shigo must have looked up Coach Steene’s address beforehand, because he didn’t ask Bensin for directions. “You could just drop me off here, sir,” Bensin suggested as they pulled into the apartment parking lot.
The officer didn’t bother to reply, just chuckled in a nice try sort of way. He parked the car and together they walked down the path and up the stairs. The lights were off, and Bensin dug in his pocket for his key. He wondered if he’d be able to sneak in without waking Coach, and then sneak out again to look for Ellie after the officer had driven away.
But before he could even pull the key out, Officer Shigo rang the doorbell. So much for that idea.
“You know, Steene Mayvins is a decent man,” the officer told him as they waited. “I always recommend honesty as the best policy anyway, but if I were you, I’d make a particular point of telling him everything right away and not holding back. I suspect you’ll end up being glad you did.”
“He’s going to sell me for this for sure,” Bensin confided in a low voice. “I don’t think anything I say will make much difference now, sir.”
Footsteps approached, and his heart began to thud.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But still, sometimes people don’t receive simply because they don’t ask. If there was ever a night to take a risk and ask for what you really want, I’d say it’s tonight.”
From the other side of the door, Coach’s voice called, “Who is it?”
“It’s Watch Officer Kalgan Shigo,” replied the officer beside him. “Are you by any chance missing a slave?”
Chapter Twenty-One: What You Really Want
The three of them stood in the living room: Bensin, scared and unsure of what to say; Officer Shigo, uniformed, serious and silent; and Coach Steene, wearing pajama shorts and a rumpled T-shirt, sleep-mussed hair, and an angry expression.
“I thought you were in your room this whole time,” he accused. “You left me a note.”
“I know, sir.” Bensin stared at the floor, once again overwhelmed with shame for his deception. Had Coach discovered the missing money? No, not yet; or he would be a lot angrier.
“We’ve talked about honesty before. Maybe it was naïve of me to believe you would really be responsible enough to go to bed that early and rest up. Maybe it was stupid of me not to double check, not to suspect that you might have sneaked out to go do who knows what in the middle of the night. But I certainly didn’t expect to be woken up to find you dragged home by a City Watch officer.”
Officer Shigo spoke up. “In his defense, Bensin did come willingly.”
“Well, I guess that’s something.” Coach Steene seemed to remember his manners. “Oh. You want to have a seat?” He gestured to the armchair and the officer nodded and sat in it. Bensin brought another chair over from the dining room for his owner.
But as he passed Coach Steene, his owner stopped him. “Hang on a second. Is that a black eye?” Anger changed to concern. “What happened to you?”
Bensin set the chair down beside the armchair. “I got in a fight.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, sir. Well, sort of.”
“Didn’t I tell you not to do anything where you could get hurt? Have you forgotten about the semifinals in the morning?”
Bensin had, and even now that he remembered, it was hard to think of that as any sort of priority. Who cared about the Grand Imperial now?
Coach sat down facing him, and Bensin stood there, squirming under the men’s gazes. “Well, talk. And no wild stories this time; I’m too tired to find them entertaining. Besides, I assume Kalgan here knows the truth, so out with it.”
Bensin licked his lips. Was Officer Shigo right? But it didn’t matter. He owed Coach the truth in any case, and then he deserved whatever punishment he got.
But, Ellie. Coach was a kind man. Maybe he would at least allow Bensin to go out again and look for Ellie before he sold him.
“Could I go get something from my room that will help it all make sense, sir?” he asked.
“I guess so. Make it quick.”
As Bensin went down the hallway, he heard Coach ask the officer, “What do you think the chances are that I’m actually going to get the whole story out of him?”
“At this point, I’d say the chances are pretty good,” the officer replied.
Bensin turned on the light and dug in the box where he kept his pants and shorts, pulling out the photograph that he had hidden at the bottom. Time to introduce his owner to Ellie.
He handed over the picture and Coach examined it. “Who’s this with you?”
“That’s my sister, sir. Her name’s Ellie and she’s five years old.”
“Your sister? You told me you didn’t have any family.”
“It’s just her and me, sir. I — I didn’t want to tell you.” He took a deep breath. “Maybe I shouldn’t have lied about her, but I’ll explain why I did.”
“Keep it brief, all right? I don’t have the patience for long stories in the middle of the night. I just want to know where you’ve been and what’s going on.”
“Yes, sir.” But Bensin didn’t know how to explain it without starting from the beginning. He told Coach about his promise to Mom before she died, and when he mentioned Ellie being free someday, both men raised their eyebrows. But neither commented, so he went on. “I kept thinking of my promise to my mom, so when she was a little older, I — I tried to help Ellie escape.”
He darted a guilty glance at Officer Shigo. “We got cau
ght and sent back to the Creghorns’, and then I tried again a year later and we got caught again. I — I just wanted a better life for my sister. I wasn’t even trying to escape with her; I knew that would probably never work. I just wanted to keep my promise and make sure she never got treated like a lot of the girls I’ve met. Anyway, after the second time was when they sold me to you, and she got her collar put on then too.”
“So that’s who you were always going back to your old neighborhood to visit, huh? I thought maybe it was a girlfriend, or something. Why didn’t you ever mention you had a sister?”
“Because — because I was still planning to find a way to get her freed. I thought if you didn’t know about her, then you couldn’t guess what I wanted to do and stop me.”
“Okay. Well, go on.”
“I found out about a guy who could cut off slaves’ collars.” He told them about seeing Ellie for sale in the newspaper, and that awful man at the Creghorns’ house. “I didn’t have time to plan anything else, and I couldn’t let him get his hands on her, so I ran away with her and we came here.”
“Here? To the apartment?”
“Yes, sir. That’s when I wrote the note, and —” He paused and bit his lip, but he had resolved to tell the truth. “And I took another pass and faked Mrs. Creghorn’s signature on it for Ellie.” He explained about riding the bus to Wenn’s and what had happened there, ending with the fight and getting arrested. “And then Officer Shigo brought me back here,” he finished, “and I still don’t know if Ellie’s okay.”
“I see.” Coach Steene frowned at him thoughtfully. “Anything else you want to fess up to while you’re at it?”
Could Coach tell that Bensin hadn’t told him everything yet? Probably. “That time I came home late, when I said I fell asleep on the bus, it was ’cause I was out making arrangements with Wenn.”
Coach was looking at him hard, and so was Officer Shigo. “Okay. Anything else?”
The Collar and the Cavvarach Page 29
