The Superiors (13 page)

Chapter Seventeen

“I have to take you back,” Draven said as soon as he emerged from the shower. The slanting rays of light made the building next door look especially red behind Cali, who stood in front of the window. Draven squinted at her and went to ready himself for work.

When he came out of the bedroom Cali was sitting in the chair where he’d found her sleeping when he got up. She sat staring at the bookshelf.

“Eat the rest if you like. Otherwise I’ll have to throw it out.” He went to the window and opened it to let the air come inside. The small apartment always got stuffy when he forgot to open it in the morning. Not that one puny window did much as far as fresh air, but it was better than nothing. When he turned back from opening the window, Cali had moved to the counter to watch him. He wondered something briefly, what she was thinking. Of course that was ludicrous. He knew as well as anyone that sapiens weren’t so complex in their thinking, but her face seemed strangely contemplative. The notion amused him and he smiled on the way to his room again.

What a strange night he was having. First the unusual attraction he’d felt for Lira and now crediting a sap as capable of higher thought. Perhaps he needed more sleep. He opened the metal box on his dressing table and looked inside at the pathetic little stash of money he’d accumulated. He took out a few bills and folded them into his wallet and went to collect his illegal sapien.

“Come along, little sap,” he called to Cali. She trudged toward him. Her face was drawn, and her eyes darted around. But she came.

Though he wanted to draw from her again, he thought if he left her healthy, she might have a few extra days before she was nearly dead again. He found it more difficult to pay exact attention to her sap flow than with other sapiens, more difficult to ration it out and stop when he should. If he could leave his teeth in her arm and stay there all night until there was nothing left to suck out of her, he would.

Instead, he put his hand around the back of her neck and pushed her out the door in front of him, keeping a good grip on her so she couldn’t run, at least not without him sensing her intention. She was quite tense but she stayed a step ahead of him and let him steer her down the short hallway to the doors that led outside, then down the steps to the car and inside. She didn’t struggle or try to run, and no one saw them. Most people still slept or stayed inside until the sun sank a bit further. But Draven had to get Cali back and come all the way up from the South End to Estrella’s.

He thought Cali’s place of employment might be angry with him for keeping her an extra day. They might try to charge him more for the second night. He decided he would negotiate for the second night. Perhaps he could save up and just buy her outright. Although he hadn’t known how to take care of her very well and he didn’t have the proper facilities, he liked having her around. It made eating easy, and she wasn’t so bad to talk to, and she wasn’t bad to look at either. And most of all, he liked having her scent permeate the apartment, so the moment he walked in all he could smell was the most delicious fragrance.

“After I became…well, a long time ago.” He had talked to only Superiors for so long that he’d forgotten that sapiens didn’t know these things.

“Do people still teach that? Reading, I mean.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose they could. Someone ought to remember. It’s been quite some time since anyone has been taught to read, though. Everyone already knows.”

He looked at her, trying to remember the reason he’d been given, but it hadn’t seemed important enough to commit to memory at the time. “I have forgotten. I probably read it somewhere,” he said, and then realized the irony of this statement and laughed. Cali laughed too, and he glanced at her, surprised again to hear the sound coming from a sap.

“Good. Let me have your hand. I very much enjoy your smell.” Darkness had fallen when Draven turned his car off the ramp onto a narrow street with dilapidated buildings and a few rusty old cars sitting in their trashy lots. The lots stood empty, still, except for a few tufts of dry grass sagging in defeat after trying to conquer the asphalt world through cracks filled with dirt-like residue.

“Scoot down in your seat,” Draven said. He put a hand on Cali’s head while she slid down until her knees touched the dash and her head was below the window level. He glanced around and sped up a bit, debating whether the trip to this dangerous and depressing side of town was worth it just for a nightcap of Cali. He would be expected to eat at the restaurant where he worked even if he had time to slip away for long enough to drive all the way down to South End and back during his break, which he did not. If only he had the money to buy her.

He decided that he would. He would save the money he made, every pent and every anya, he would put them in the tin on his dressing table until he had enough for her, and then he would work on getting the correct equipment for caring for livestock. He would be dining with Byron’s family soon, and he would ask about homo-sapien care, about equipment and facilities, and he would learn everything he could about them. By the time he bought Cali, he would know how to take care of her, what she was supposed to do and what was abnormal.

Draven’s mind filled with these thoughts until he pulled onto the street containing Sap Heaven, Sap Haven, and several other eateries of the same nature. He pulled up short in surprise, and Cali sat up. Instantly Draven’s hand shot out and nearly crushed her by pushing her down in the seat so fast. She made a small strangled noise of pain, and he jerked his hand back. Her eyes got watery and shiny and she sucked her lips in.

“Have I hurt you?” Draven asked, pushing the car up to a slow cruising speed. From the corner of his eye, he saw Cali shake her head no.

“Good. Your employment appears to be over. Your restaurant has been raided by the Enforcers. It will be closed down.”

“How do you know?”

Draven smiled. “There are laws about the treatment of saps, and this place violates nearly all of them. So you are out of a job. If you had been there, you would have been confiscated along with the rest of the restaurant’s live property.”

“So what are you going to do with me?” she asked in a small voice.

Draven glanced at her. He had forgotten she was barely older than a child. And sapiens were apt to frighten with little or no provocation.

“
Zut!
I don’t know.” He paused and turned left at the end of the street. “I couldn’t just stop and dump you out in front of the place. I would have been arrested for having you at all—they’d think I…acted inappropriately towards you. Perhaps I could bring you back now and say I found you on the street, that you’d escaped during the raid…” But he didn’t stop. He kept driving. Musing. “But they probably wouldn’t believe me. You’d look like the damn lottery prize to most of the derelicts around here. You’d be drained dry in five minutes. You’d never have made it to another street. And the saps in that place are all too weak to run anyway.”

Cali didn’t say anything. She just sat looking at the blue-black of the darkening sky and let him continue. “I could put you out but that would be even worse, because then you really would be sucked dry, and I wouldn’t just be slapped with a fine for borrowing you.”

“You could keep me?” Cali said in that same small voice. He glanced at her, frowning. She sounded almost hopeful. Why wouldn’t she be? He’d treated her well and kept her calm. And probably saved her life, with great risk to himself and not much personal gain. In fact, he’d been quite reckless and stupid.

“I can’t keep you,” he said. “I rented you. I had to fill out a form guaranteeing I’d bring you back in equal or better health to when I got you. If I kept you, I’d have to pay your full purchase price, and I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t.” He didn’t want to admit to a sap that he had no money. He’d already mentioned it once, and she didn’t need to know those things about Superiors. Not that it mattered what she thought, but still. He knew she couldn’t understand if he tried to explain it to her, and it would just frustrate him more. “Be quiet so I can think,” he said, stroking her hair. All the way back he pondered his options.

When he drew close to his side of town, he turned right instead of left and sped up. “I’ve decided what I shall do.”

“What?” Cali asked, looking around. He sensed her increasing fear immediately. He took her wrist again and could feel the sap throbbing through her veins, could hear the acceleration in her heartbeat, the faint creeping odor of fear in the air inside the car.

“You’ll be alright, little pet. I won’t hurt you.” He pressed his nose to her wrist and breathed deeply of her scent, already missing her. “Nothing bad will happen to you. They take good care of livestock at the Confinement. It wasn’t so bad last time, was it?”

“You’re taking me back to the Confinement?” She pushed with her feet until she was sitting straight up in the seat. Her eyes widened as she looked ahead with him.

“Yes. I will tell them that I found you wandering and you appeared weak but not badly injured, and you were in a bad part of town. I didn’t know where you came from, and I didn’t imagine you’d live if I passed by and left you. They will scan your code and find that you belong to a restaurant that has been closed, and they will keep you. Do you understand what I’ve said to you?”

“I did, once. But I was younger and stupid and I didn’t know how lucky I was. Maybe I’ll find some of my family, if they haven’t been sold. It’s been so long, though… I don’t know if I’ll recognize them.”

“You have family?”

“Yeah, my mama and a lot of sisters. Mama made lots of new babies and the overseers treat her good because of it. I hope she’s still there.”

“I am glad you find this agreeable. It is the best I could think to do. You must remember what I’ve said to you, so you can tell the same thing if anyone asks. Can you repeat what I said to you, where I found you, what happened?”

She briefly recapped what he had said, but she sounded distracted and he could feel her tension. She sat on her hands, leaning forward in the seat, looking out the windshield and smiling. He grew annoyed that she didn’t seem to take the situation seriously. He could be slapped with a large fine for having an illegal sapien, even a bit of jail time if he had committed another offense with her. He hoped the record of bringing her in the last time wouldn’t pop up in the system. It would seem a bit strange that the same Superior kept finding the same sapien wandering the streets.

He stopped at the back of the large parking lot, away from the security lights and cameras. “I will bring you inside so you don’t run again,” he said.

“I won’t run.”

“You can’t trust a runner,” Draven said, looking at Cali. “Although I don’t imagine you are strong enough yet.”

“Thank you so much for bringing me here,” she said, her voice welling with emotion. She leaned towards him and he just sat there, not sure what she intended, wary of her. And before he could be shocked by the realization of her intention, her arms circled his neck.

Chapter Eighteen

Cali’s smell flooded Draven’s nostrils and he filled with incredible hunger and longing at the mouthwatering aroma of her sap, flowing and pumping through every part of her, in the arms that surrounded him, in the warm knot of muscles at her shoulders, the soft little swells of her breasts, the neck that was so, so close to his mouth and so alive with veins.

But with the desire came something else, the unpleasant sensation of having a mass of warm flesh between his hands, the distasteful feeling he got when he touched a sapien now multiplied tenfold, and even her smell couldn’t quell his discomfort.