by Sara King
Then, once the jump-mutations were recognized, the Imperium had given every sub-Empire orders to exterminate on sight. Eliminating Psis and other human-base mutations had been the Imperium’s first order of business, once her father had landed with his fleet. Psi natives had been hunted for decades. They thought they had got them all.
Victoria, seeing a way to remove the man from her belt permanently, opened her mouth to scream for the guards.
She saw the man’s blue eyes drop, saw the resignation in his face.
He just put his life in my hands.
Victory hesitated, frowning at him. Softly, she said, “You know I could have you killed.”
He gave her a tired, tentative smile. “Princess, from the looks of things, you could have me killed at any time.”
Instinctively, Victory glanced at the nick in his throat left by the Praetorian’s blade. It was still oozing a slow line of crimson down his neck.
She bit her lip, once again glancing at the door. If I have them take him away, she thought, Father would just find someone else.
And a Psi was…
…interesting. She had always wanted to meet one. As children, she and Matthias had planned to go out and capture a Psi and bring him back to be their playmate. Their father, upon hearing of their plans, had been furious, and had claimed that, had the Imperium learned of their antics, it would have had them both removed as Adjudicator Potentiates. Speaking of Psis—or any of their genetic kin—had been absolutely forbidden from that point on, which had only made her and Matthias more determined to find one.
And now she had one, not eight feet away. The only problem was that his every move made six years of terror stir within her.
He started to get up, exposing more of his big body to her.
Victory quickly huddled down behind the bed again. “Stay where you are!”
On the other side of the massive bed, the Psi stilled. Victory listened to his breathing, watching his knees under the bed. After another twenty minutes passed, he said, “Princess, if you’re not going to have me killed, I need to relieve myself. I’ve been holding it since this morning.”
Victory closed her eyes and drew herself into a fetal position on the floor. She had been dreading this. The lavatory was immense, the toilet located a good ten feet inside the doorway, trapping her inside with him. She said nothing, hoping that his urge would go away.
“This is a very nice rug,” the man commented.
Victory winced. Slowly, carefully, she sat up and peered over the mattress at him. She swallowed at the thought of crossing it, once more leaving nothing but chain between them.
“Are you really a Psi?” she whispered, searching his cerulean eyes. Somehow, with their bodies hidden from each other by the bed, it was easier to cope with his presence.
His face twisted in a strained smile. “A Psi that’s about to pee himself.”
A third of her wanted to tell him to pee—that she wasn’t going to get anywhere near him. Another third of her didn’t want to deal with the smell of urine until one of her maids came to clean it up. The last third was caught between the horror of seeing his body again, and the horrible bad form of not even giving him a proper place to relieve himself.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the man said softly. “I can’t.” He jingled the shackles holding his arms behind his back.
Of course he could. A Psi could destroy one’s thoughts, change one’s memories, speak inside the mind…
Then a more disturbing thought occurred to her. A man doesn’t need his arms to hold a woman down and use her.
“Is there a chamberpot on your side?” the man asked, desperation in his voice. “You can just slide it over to my side of the bed and I’ll make do.”
Victory frowned, struck from that thought by the barbarian’s provinciality. “This is a civilized household. We have a composting toilet.”
The Psi whimpered and dropped his head to the bed, face down. “I’m gonna have to pee the rug, aren’t I?”
Victory gnashed her lip between her teeth, considering. Finally, she said, “I’m going to come over there.” Then, as his head darted up in gratitude, she growled, “But don’t move until I’m on the other side.”
He nodded, his blue eyes pleading.
Victory swallowed and started to crawl over the bed, but stopped when more of his body was revealed. She shrank back, fear and dread wrenching her gut.
The Psi said nothing, just remained absolutely still, like a woodsman trying to tame a wild animal. “Would it help if I looked away?” he asked softly.
He knows I’m afraid of him, Victory thought, fighting humiliation. She was a princess and he was a slave and she couldn’t come within six feet from him without bawling like a terrified child.
She yanked a sheet off of the bed and threw it over him, so that it covered his face, head, and body. He remained motionless, a black mound of embroidered cloth.
“Stay there,” Victory said, hating the trembling in her voice.
He nodded against the sheet.
She bit her lip, watching the fabric move with his breathing. It didn’t hide what it concealed, but at least it made it easier to stomach. Reluctantly, Victory began crawling across the bed. The last two feet before the other side, with the man’s big body only a couple feet away, her nerves finally failed her and she made a panicked scramble, lunging to her feet and hitting the end of the chain, hard.
The man grunted, but otherwise remained silent.
“Get up,” Victory managed, every nerve humming. “Leave the sheet where it is.”
“I don’t know how well it will stay on,” the Psi said, “But I can try.” He eased backwards over his feet, then stood up.
Victory gasped. She had forgotten how big he was. “Get low,” she babbled, looking away. “Gods…” She stared at the floor, feeling like she was going to vomit.
He hunched under the sheet, so it looked like he was barely taller than she. “Better?” he asked.
“Much,” she whispered, trying to keep her utter gratitude from showing. She looked at the door to the lavatory, her heart-rate already starting that frenzied climb. “Follow me.” She led him, shuffling and hunched under his sheet, to the restroom. She opened the door, and only then did she realize her problem. The toilet was far in the back, near the large stone basin tub. She could let him step inside first, but then he would have no idea where to go with the sheet over his head. And she was not about to take his hand and guide him.
The second problem was that the toilet seat lid was down, the room ever-so-thoughtfully maintained by her household staff.
If she led him into the room to lift the seat, she would be trapping herself. A spike of terror began worming its way through her gut as she considered being pinned against the wall by his massive body while he—
“I just want to pee,” he promised. “I don’t care where or how at this point.”
She flinched, glancing back at the lump of sheet. He can read my mind, she thought, unnerved. Then, biting her lip, she snatched a heavy golden mermaid-statue off of the shelf beside the door. With it in a fist, she found the confidence to continue. “I’m going to lead you in. When I tell you to stop, you stop. Understand? You don’t, and I’m gonna cave your skull in.”
He nodded, a bobbing in the sheet.
Swallowing hard, Victory moved into the lavatory, pulling him with her.
He never stumbled, never slowed. When he reached the shift from carpet to tiled stone, he didn’t flinch or hesitate. He walked through the door and kept moving.
It’s almost like he can see through the sheet, Victory thought, frowning. As far as she knew, Psis couldn’t see or affect anything but another mind.
She backed to the toilet, then, still watching him carefully, squatted to lift the seat. Then she backed up, crawled over the edge of the huge white marble tub, then climbed onto the shelf on the far side, against the wall, gripping the statue in a white-knuckled fist. You’re trapping yourself, a
frantic voice in her mind started to babble. You’ve got nowhere to run…
“Stop,” she said.
But he was already turning, and she watched as he squatted forward over the toilet, sheet blocking her view. At the first sounds of liquid hitting the bowl, she swallowed and looked away.
“Ohthankgods.” The big man let out a huge sigh and thumped his sheet-covered forehead against the wall.
“Done?” Victory demanded, disgusted by her father’s cruelty. When she was Adjudicator, she would make an Imperial decree that slaves could not be chained to living beings. Such was barbarism of the highest degree.
“Yes,” he said, sounding utterly relieved. “Thank you.”
“Turn around and walk out,” Victory snapped, to keep the desperation out of her voice. What if he didn’t turn? What if he didn’t obey her? What if he decided to, instead, step into the bath with her and—
He turned and shuffled back towards the door.
Once he was well out of reach, Victory followed gingerly, but hesitated at the toilet, the thought of revisiting the whole nerve-wracking experience again in an hour making her feel sick. And yet, the thought of performing a function so private, within eight feet of a naked man, left her nauseous.
The Psi, once the chain went taut between them, stopped.
Seeing him wait there, patiently, Victory made her decision.
“Don’t turn around,” Victory whispered, her voice thick with shame. She squatted and, as quickly as she could, finished her business, then sent the result to the composter. She was shaking by the time she got back to her feet.
The Psi waited, motionless, hunched over as low as his big body could go without falling over.
“Back to the bed,” Victory said, too mortified to speak more than a whisper.
The Psi moved flawlessly towards the bed, then, without being told, knelt again on the floor at his side.
Once she was sure he wasn’t going to try and move, Victory rushed past him and flung herself across the bed, then dropped into a huddle on the other side. She grabbed her ankles and, bringing her knees up under her chin, closed her eyes and started rocking against the images that began invading her consciousness from having come within arm’s reach. Men, their big arms reaching out, with her chained, nowhere to run…
“They’re not real,” the man said softly, from under the sheet. “They happened in another life.”
Victory’s eyes narrowed at the edge of the mattress. “That’s where you’re wrong.” She hadn’t meant to say it, and wasn’t sure she had, but she felt the man’s breath catch.
“Oh my gods,” he whispered.
Understanding
Her voice had been low and quiet, but it had also been laced with bitterness and contempt. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Dragomir felt his breath catch, losing control of his emotions for the first time since the prince invaded his home and dragged him, alone, back onto the ship. He felt the energy around him spike with horror even as his heart rama flung itself wide open, releasing a floodgate of compassion. “Oh my gods.”
She said nothing, hunched in silence on the other side of the bed.
Suddenly, everything he had seen within her heart-rama began to make sense. Automatically, he found himself feeding his consciousness back through the tiny needle-entrance to get another look. The cruel visions of pain and humiliation were strangling the rich silver gi inside, choking the rama to a tiny shadow of what it could have been.
“They took you,” he managed, shocked. “The rebels took you.”
She didn’t respond physically, but her heart-rama slammed shut and her energy solidified around her, forcing his consciousness back outside her au. He heard a small sound, low and quiet. Dragomir, frustrated, twisted his hands in their shackles. She needed to be held—every inch of him could feel it. Chained and hobbled like he was, though, any movement he made would only scare her.
“I’ll hold you, if you want,” he finally offered. Perhaps, if he had any luck, she could feel the dormant connection between them. If she did, it might make her more willing to trust him. If she didn’t, he was walking on glass. Most non-Gifted, he had noticed, rarely felt such things, or even believed they existed.
The crying stopped for a moment, and he winced. When she didn’t scream disgusted curses at him, as he expected, he allowed himself a bit of hope.
“Stop talking,” she said. Her voice was ice.
Once again, he was reminded that the woman had the power of life or death over him, and that she was very close to exercising it. Again, Dragomir wondered what had he been thinking, telling her—a royal princess—that he was a ‘mutagenic anomaly,’ as the Imperium liked to call it. The Imperials killed people like him. By all rights, she should have called in her guard the moment he let it slip what he was. Yet, for some unknown reason, this girl who was so obviously terrified of him had let him live. Why?
Unhappily, he closed his eyes and focused on reaching into his core and sending what warmth he could, in his own humiliated state.
After a moment, she quieted. Her rama petals ticked open a bit, once again allowing a thin stream of his golden gi to pass beyond its protective shell.
She gasped. “You’re doing that, aren’t you?”
Dragomir froze. He had long ago learned that the Imperials feared what they didn’t understand. And one of the things that Imperials could not seem to grasp was that Emps could not hurt people. It was against their nature. Yet, by Imperial decree, Emps were cancerous tumors of society that needed to be excised before they murdered whole villages ‘as they had on the core planets.’ Official Imperial policy, last he heard, was that Emps were mass-murderers.
Yet, if Emps were psychopathic serial-killers, how did the Imperials manage to snatch them from their homes and drag them to the headsman’s block without losing hundreds of soldiers in the process? It was a small thing for Dragomir to cut a few gi lines and prematurely end a life. He assumed that his brethren—those who hadn’t been hunted and killed by the invaders—could do the same. Yet, despite the capability, Dragomir never had. Even the Praetorian who had deserved it most had died by Dragomir’s fists, instead. He’d never heard of an Emp hurting someone with their gift. It just wasn’t done.
“Answer me,” the princess grated.
Dragomir lowered his forehead to stare at the blanket, dark beneath the sheet. He felt his own life balancing on his next word. “Yes,” he managed.
She hissed, half snarl, half rage, and fisted her hand in the tether at his neck, pulling it tight. “You dare?!” He knew then that she was going to kill him. He could feel it rolling off of her in a sick, black rage. Pinned by the chain, arms fixed in helplessness behind him, he was utterly incapable of defending himself, and the experience left him humbled, more than a little terrified. Even when hanging from the rack, screaming his rage as her brother whipped the objections out of him, he hadn’t felt so utterly at another’s mercy.
He felt her get up onto the bed, putting her knee on the chain to pin it in place to the mattress, felt the tide of emotions clash around her as she approached him with a heavy golden statue grasped in a fist. Then, silence. For long moments, he waited for her killing blow.
“I was wrong about you,” the woman finally whispered. Dragomir lifted his head and looked at her nervously from under the sheet. Her green eyes were stony, her normally pale skin flushed, her freckles tightened in a scowl. She had a thundercloud of negative energy swirling around her like a winter storm, and her pert chin was jutting out imperiously. “You can’t actually read my mind, can you?”
Dragomir shook his head.
“Then you’re an Emp,” she said. She hefted the golden mermaid thoughtfully. “If you were a Psi, you would’ve known I had planned on killing you just now.”
“I was getting that general idea,” Dragomir whispered up at her.
Her eyes were cold green emeralds. “I still haven’t decided yet.”
“I know.” He swal
lowed.
“Close your eyes. Turn your head away.”
Oh gods, a part of Dragomir’s mind screamed. That’s what they say before they execute you. Once, as a small child, he had witnessed an Imperial squad line up a group of village men. They shot all of the ones that were huddling, backs to the soldiers, but one of them refused to look away. Even after his fellows were dead on the ground around him, he kept peering into the eyes of the soldier who was to kill him. The soldier kept screaming, “Close your eyes. Turn around!”
And, eventually, he did. And the soldier shot him.
They buried their bodies in a shallow pit in a mountain meadow. They used Imperial tanks to fill it in.
Looking into the princess’s eyes, Dragomir remembered Meggie. He remembered what had been done to her, remembered being unable to save her, remembered the rope that had been strangling him when his brother had come hurtling up the road, at night in his underwear, to cut him down, remembered lying on the ground in his brother’s arms, willing himself to let go, when his brother had loosened the rope and pounded on his chest, forcing him back.
He remembered this Imperial’s connection hitting him like an avalanche, rocking him out of his seat, sloshing the poisoned mead across the table, leaving him in a daze for hours, lying in a puddle, staring at the rafters in his ceiling as he tried to understand what had hit him.
A month later, an Imperial ship had set down on the grass outside his home. The green-eyed devil—flanked by twenty black-clad Praetorian—had put a gun to his head and told him to get on the ugly black vessel. Dragomir had almost fought them. Almost. Something, though, some nagging tug, had told him to cooperate. So, instead of infusing the Praetorian with terror long enough to escape into the mountains, Dragomir had allowed the green-eyed devil to put him in chains.
Now he was wondering why.
Dragomir had spent many sleepless nights trying to understand why the Universe had spared him. Brought to a princess like he had been this morning, after being shackled in the hull of a ship for two days in the dark, bound for for some unknown destination, then hung from a rack and tortured for another three days for crimes that were never specified, he had harbored a faint hope that perhaps it had all been to help this soon-to-be ruler heal, that she was the reason why Life had sent Thor up the road that night, instead of leaving Dragomir to stiffen in the breeze.
