Cracked Porcelain

by Drake Collins

  “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

  She gently shook her head, her throat seemingly swelling shut. “No. Thank you.”

  Maximillia laid still, her body drained of the will to move. She could only stare blankly at the ceiling, tears pooling on top of her pillow. The devastation was impossible to conceal.

  Maximillia’s wheelchair carted her out through the sliding hospital doors and into the unforgiving Arcean daylight. The light blasted her in the face, forcing her to wince. It was too bright. She’d grown used to false, gaudy neon lights slicing through the dark, musty corridors of Xartha’s and the muddy, rusty confines of the Bruiser compound. The hospital’s sterile, angular, minimalist facade and its finely landscaped complex floor was far more alien to her than any of her clients.

  A suspicious, black stretched limo hovered next to the sidewalk. The rear passenger door swept open. Dom was sitting in the backseat, coated in his perpetual finish of passively smug confidence. Her wheelchair rolled to a stop at the edge of the sidewalk. She stared at him, blank-faced.

  He held out a plated claw. “Come. Unless you’re walking home.”

  “I think I should walk home.”

  “What home?” he chuckled. “That glorified shantytown where the Bruisers hang their hats? That home? Or maybe the streets? A back alley? Under a bridge? You don‘t have a home.”

  Maximillia pushed herself up and out of the wheelchair, preparing to walk off.

  “Who do you think arranged for your hospital stay?”

  She stopped dead in place and turned back to him. “You?”

  “Some of your Bruiser brothers and sisters aren’t as dumb as I expected. They told me what happened.”

  “And you came in to save the day. How noble,” she muttered, joylessly glaring at him. The sarcasm in her words were baldly apparent.

  “I couldn’t have my star player benched, now could I? I consider you an investment. All of the time and money that’s been put into training you? You’re my thoroughbred. C’mon. Have a seat.”

  She started to walk away, moving down the sidewalk. The limo rolled along beside her, the door still open. “You really want to spend the rest of your life in a condemned molecular assembly plant? You want to roll with two-bit thieves and lowlifes who haven’t met a bad decision they didn’t like? They live in the muck. That’s not freedom. That’s misery.”

  “And what I do at Xartha’s isn’t?”

  “We all gotta pay our debts. You joined up with a dipshit crew. Their debts became yours. A shitty hand, yes, but you asked for the cards. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about where you go once you’ve cleared the slate.”

  “What about it?”

  “I like you, Maximillia. You remind me a lot of myself. You’ve got this fire burning away inside you but you keep it hidden away. You contain it. I want you to let it out. I want to see it. I want to see all of you.”

  “Like my clients?”

  “I can’t have the car keep floating along like this,” he said. “Get in. Let’s talk like two civilized adults.”

  Her boldness grew. “Neither one of us is civilized.”

  “Then let’s start being civilized. Get in. Listen to what I have to say. If you’re not interested then I’ll accept that. Just an exchange of words. Consider it a business meeting. I want to sell you something. Whether or not you buy is up to you.”

  Maximillia stopped, tilting her head back and sighing. He wouldn’t relent. Her legs were heavy and the road ahead agonizingly long. The cushy limo seats beckoned her. She gave in, stepping inside and plopping down in the seat across from Dom as the door swept down, locking shut. The limo sped off. Dom’s grin revealed a man who rarely suffered a verbal defeat.

  He reached towards a small compartment beside his seat. The compartment door slid open revealing a glass filled with Eloquis, a dark brown liquor.

  “Have a drink with me.”

  Her face remained slack, uninterested. “I thought this was a negotiation. You’re trying to sell me something.”

  “Well, I like to get a little lubricated before business. Loosens me up. Helps me think better, to be quite honest.”

  “I’ll stay dry, thanks.”

  Dom nodded in acceptance, sipping at the Eloquis.

  He watched her look unintentionally adorable; a delicate, callow babe who fidgeted in her seat, her eyes curling skeptically around the insides of the limo. There was a precious vulnerability to her.

  “You don’t trust me, do you?” Dom asked.

  She began to sink back into that sheepish young girl. “Not really.”

  “You know, girls like you really are rare. I mean that. I’ll bet you had a rare upbringing, too. Your parents, did they enter into a Covenant? That’s what you humans do, isn’t it?”

  After moments of hesitation, she shook her head. “My father wanted to. She didn‘t want it. She didn’t even want me.”

  “Father is an old-fashioned idealist, huh? Who makes that investment anymore? Talk about the gamble of a lifetime,” he chuckled.

  “Lots of people do.”

  “Really? Where?”

  She couldn’t field that question with an honest answer. The Covenant had grown out of the ancient human tribal rites of matrimony and was largely a cultural relic; a trait of a bygone age when social dependence, a fragile physiology, crippled medical technologies and depressingly short life spans required voluntary—and sometimes involuntary—unions to ensure the proliferation of the species. The human race outgrew the need for the social coercion of forced pairings for the sake of procreation when science provided the tools necessary for the first man to set foot on an alien world tens of light-years away. The progressive subsequent technologies granted true freedom, freeing them of the social and cultural trappings that had limited the human race's reach for enlightenment.

  Even then, Man was a social animal and intuitively craved the convenience and emotional quickening that a pair bonding provided. The post-modern neurosciences melded with the quaint mechanisms of human tradition and allowed for those who volunteered to be joined into Covenants to do so with a transcendently technological flair. The process yielded a neuronal merging of the two minds via tools of a nearly esoteric substrate of engineering, creating an empathic hivemind between them. After the procedure, to a degree, what one of them felt, so did the other, creating the ideal platform for an enduring social harmony. This was an especially grave commitment considering that the bonds generated via the process were so strong and irreversible that, should one of the parties involved die, then invariably so would the other. Because of this, few couples sought to pursue this endeavor.

  Dom snickered at the frailty of the human female before him and the species from which she came. “Just a few hundred years ago the human race was a brittle upstart dancing on a knife’s edge. Your bodies would rot and die off in seventy or eighty of your home world's years. Your species was relegated to clinging to a singular biosphere with all of your proverbial eggs in one big, blue basket. Can you believe that?”

  She continued to glare at him with an air of insubordination, keeping silent.

  “I’ve studied your kind extensively. Fascinating. Your people entered into Covenants as a sort of guarantee that they’d survive genetically. They’d pop those babies out as fast as they could because the clock was ticking. They had a couple of decades and then that was it. As a man, if you didn’t deliver that seed in time you’d eventually end up looking in the mirror at an old man. You’d be a footnote in evolutionary history. People were deathly afraid of that. It’s an instinct, you know? Survival.”

  “Is this part of the negotiation?”

  “It is. See, every single one of your clients have something in common, regardless of physiology. Regardless of what they look like or what their plumbing looks like, there is something in our brains that wants the same thing: We want to survive. But it’s a conflict, too; part of the brain just wants to have fun. We get off on th
at chemical rush when you get inside of a girl for the first time, or the first time you rob someone, or the first million uni-creds you see on your bank statement. The other part of the brain wants to live. We want two things: to eat and fuck. When you’re with a client and you two are doing what you’re doing, that part of the brain kicks in and the body goes into auto-pilot. You are giving them the sensation that every single living organism with a male brain and a set of balls craves: the guarantee that their genetic information is going to survive. That they’re going to survive into the future. Even if they know deep down that it’s all a fantasy, in the moment, the fantasy is real. It’s the same feeling your ancestors had thirty-thousand years ago fucking in a cave, wrapped in fur hides trying to stave off the snow blowing in sideways for just long enough to cum. That primal sensation. Nothing’s changed. You have value because, whether you realize it or not, you’re good at making a man feel like he’s having fun and that he’s going to survive. If anyone’s a drug dealer, you are,” he laughed. “You can give a man a high that you can’t get any other way. When I tell you that

  you’re a thoroughbred and a valued investment, that’s what I mean.”

  “Isn’t it considered dumb to tell someone you’re negotiating with how valuable they are?”

  He sipped from his glass, impressed. “You’re right,” he said, patting the seat next to him. “Come on over here. If we’re going to talk business, let’s really talk. I’m not such a bad guy when you get to know me.”

  Apprehensively, Maximillia rose up, crossed to the other side of the limo and sat beside Dom. He draped his arm on the headrest behind her. She noted this, already slightly irritated with his daring. She sat forward slightly, keeping her back off the cushion.

  “You should be thankful. After all, I consider myself your benefactor now. If it wasn’t for me you’d probably be rotting in a sandy ditch out in the desert somewhere.”

  “I didn’t ask for your help.”

  “But I gave it, nonetheless. You chose him. Mardo. You chose the life. He owed me, so, by proxy, you owe me.”

  “I’m working for you because I don’t have a choice. Right? I do it, or else. I know what people like you are like.”

  He was amused. “What are we like?”

  “You hold grudges and you don’t forget.”

  Touché. He nodded. “That is not incorrect. In my business you have to hold grudges. It all comes back to survival.”

  “So, what are you selling me?”

  “What exactly do you see in him?”

  “Mardo?” She shrugged. “I was stupid, I guess. I just—”

  “You were looking for something and he was there to tell you what you thought you were looking for.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve known Mardo for a long time. He’s a fucking degenerate. He goes through girls like you with stunning frequency. Me? I’m a one-woman man.”

  Maximillia looked at him, suspicion growing in her.

  “I’ll get to the point,” he offered. “I see an undiscovered jewel in you. You don’t belong out there in the desert with those fucking dregs. You’re a princess living at the bottom of a well.” He brushed her cheek with his thumb.

  She cautiously inched back away.

  “You deserve to live in the penthouse looking down on the dregs instead of toiling in the muck with them. I’ve seen what you’re capable of. I want what you can give me.”

  “What?”

  “What we just talked about. Excitement and that illusion of survival.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I told you. I’m a one-woman man. I don’t have a woman. There’s a vacant spot. I want you to fill it.”

  She glared at him, containing her revulsion.

  “I can give you anything you want. You’re royalty. You deserve the accoutrements of royalty. You deserve everything that comes along with it.”

  Maximillia couldn‘t believe what she was hearing. She had to put an end to it. “You can’t buy love.”

  “Who said anything about love? I’m talking about an exchange. I give to you and you give to me. I give you everything that I have and you give me every part of you.”

  “I’m not for sale.”

  He guffawed. “Sweetheart, you get bought every night.”

  She swung at his face with an open hand, but he snatched her scrawny wrist before impact. “Lively! I love it!”

  Maximillia struggled futilely.

  “I’m your hostage. My clients rent me. No one owns me.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong. I own you, bitch. I own you,” he growled.

  She bared her teeth, breathing through her nostrils, her rage radiating off of her. “You don’t own me.”

  “You don’t think so?” he asked, grabbing her other wrist and shoving it up against the headrest, holding both of her wrists down with his left hand. "Here, take a look. Your greatest hits." A holographic video screen flickered alive beside them showing a security camera feed from one of Xartha's private rooms. It revealed a candid moment between Maximillia and one of her clients as she orally serviced him. The video switched to another feed from the security camera affixed in the alley beside Xartha's as a saracian violently fucked Maximillia from behind.

  She sneered at Dom, ready to claw his eyes out. "I've got all of your little indiscretions, burned and in living color." She struggled but he effortlessly held her still. "But it's okay. Those were just auditions for the main event. You were just in training. Fight night is tonight and mine is the last dick you're ever going to fuck."

  Futilely, she shook her head. "Not even in your dreams."

  He slammed her wrists firmly against the head board. "Oh, this isn't a dream. We're wide awake and you're being filmed right now."

  Her eyes darted about, searching for the all-seeing eyes.

  "Don't bother. The cameras are integrated into the frame. I want to immortalize this moment and they're going to record every angle and every second of the action. You hear me?!"

  Maximillia thrashed about, trying to pull away, but his strength dwarfed her own and he easily had both of her arms pinned back against the headrest with a single hand. He raked at her top with his free right hand, yanking it down. “Stop!” she screamed, pushing against the floor with her legs as her breasts were unwillingly exposed.

  Flustered, he reached into his coat and drew out a polished coilarm: a hand-sized oranium projectile accelerator. Upon seeing it, she froze, halting her vociferous resistance.

  “I didn’t want to have to do it this way,” he said, letting go of her wrists. He gestured to the seat across from them. “Get back over there.”

  She cautiously crawled back across to the other seat and sat back, silently terrified.

  He held the sidearm at his waist. “Your panties. Lose 'em.”

  Petrified, she gazed down at the barrel of the blaster, then locked eyes with him. He meant business. She undid the flap on her shorts and slid them down her legs, kicking them off. Delicately, she peeled her panties off, piling them on top of her shorts before sitting back with her knees shut.

  “Sit back and spread ‘em. I want to see your honey pot.”

  Maximillia’s mind raced, desperately assessing the situation, calculating the best escape strategy. The limo was coasting along at a fairly rapid pace. The doors were locked. The car’s route was programmed and couldn’t be stopped. She had no choice but to comply with his commands.

  She sat back, slowly opening her legs, revealing her petite, pink gash resting in the valley of her long, pale white legs.

  “Will you look at that? Absolutely fucking beautiful,” Dom remarked, awestruck.

  Maximillia realized she’d have to play the game if she wanted to get out alive.

  “Rub it,” he commanded.

  With her feet planted firmly on the seat, Maximillia reached down with her right hand and started rubbing up and down her slit. She was bone dry, but had to persevere. He was interested in the fantasy that she provid
ed the clients at Xartha’s so she was going to entertain his. It was the only way. With a bit of theatrical zest, she moved her fingers along her slit, passively biting her lip for effect. Dom was completely engrossed. The coilarm hung loosely in his grip as his eyes bore a hole into her crotch, enjoying every microsecond of watching her play.

  After a few minutes, he gestured her with a curl of his plate-clad fingers. “C’mere. On your hands and knees.”

  She wondered what he could’ve possibly wanted. Unfortunately, deep down, she knew. Her playing was just a warm-up for him. He fished around with the magnetized bars on his fly, undoing them, and drawing out his semi-hard cock. Unlike the rest of his bone-plated exterior, his cock was a distended hunk of smooth, ridged flesh; disturbingly large, dark and enveloped in thick veins. She did as directed and crawled over to him until his meat was mere inches from his face.

  He sneered, looking down on her. “You know what to do.”

  She sighed, panicking. “Isn’t there anything else I—”

  “Do it,” he commanded.

  At the end of her rope, Maximillia couldn’t hold back the tears. “Please.”

  Dom lost his patience and barked down at her. “Do it!” Spittle hit her in the face and she flinched, noticing the coilarm right next to her head. No way out. Resigned to her fate, she closed her eyes and sat forward, taking the head of his cock into her mouth. He exhaled, smiling with a barbarous self-satisfaction as she let her lips caress his meat. She went slow at first, guided by his left hand which was clasped around the back of her head.

  "You're going to like your new job, baby. You're going to fuck me day and night, whether you want to or not. I've got some stuff I'm going to let you try that puts Gatekeeper to shame. This new stuff is like mother's milk. By the end of it, you'll be begging for my cock. You'll be my drugged-up little slave girl, forever," he boasted. "And the best part is that you're not even gonna care."

  As she sucked, Maximillia calculated how fast she’d have to be to snatch the coilarm out of his hand. It was close, but he was strong. If she failed she didn’t want to entertain the consequences. She kept her sucking pace steady and inconspicuous. She didn’t want to get him too riled by being too energetic with her technique.