The Superiors (3 page)

He touched the inside of her arm, the old white scars and the newer, red puncture wounds. Some of them hadn’t been cauterized fully. One of them didn’t look like it had been sealed at all. It was still fresh and looked tender and a bit swollen, probably as new as a few nights ago or even last night.

“Does this hurt?” he asked, placing his thumb on the worst of the red welts. Her skin, like that of all saps, held the usual warmth of a warm-blooded species, but here it almost scalded him. He pulled his thumb away partly out of disgust for the heat, something he had grown a bit squeamish of after so many years without it, and partly because she jerked when he touched it. Her eyes went wide and she drew in a quick breath.

“No,” she said. But Draven had worked with enough saps to know that body language was a more accurate read than words. Most saps, even when they spoke his language, didn’t know themselves. His frustration at their stupidity had caused him to quit a job working at the sap clinic. Most of them reported different symptoms on different days or to different Superiors, or didn’t know answers about their own bodies when asked.

“I can draw from this arm,” he said, taking her other arm, which looked better. “It won’t hurt as much. Or I can take from this one and close these marks someone left open, but it will hurt quite a bit.”

He smiled a bit on seeing the emergence of her old personality. He’d drawn a bit too much in his hunger last time he’d had her. She’d been weak when he’d taken her back to the Confinement that night and told them she’d gotten lost in the shuffle. But there was nothing to be done for it now. It happened.

He rubbed the pale inside of her upper arm. He used a cord when he could to avoid touching the saps too much—their warm slowness made him shudder a bit—but this one’s warmth didn’t bother him as much as some of the others. She wasn’t fleshy like a lot of the females of mating age. Her sap began to flow more quickly where he rubbed, and his hunger mounted. He smelled a subtle difference in her sap, a thicker more complete quality, and he knew she’d reached sexual maturity for a sapien. He couldn’t remember anymore when that normally happened, but it made her scent even more wonderful.

He took up the towel, still rolled, from the tray and handed it to her. “I’m neat. I won’t waste a drop,” he said. “But you may need to bite on this for the pain.”

Before she could answer he aligned his teeth and buried them in the two red wounds inside her arm. Her sap leapt up at him, flowed into him without the slightest pull. At first he could taste the trace of bitter from the previous wound, and then her warm nectar flowed smoothly. He had only a dim awareness that she’d gone rigid, that her feet were digging into the smooth surface of the floor, that she was making a high groaning sound through her nose, and her breath was coming fast.

It had taken him a long time to become adept at gauging the exact amount of sap to draw, but now he could tell precisely when to stop. He withdrew at the last possible moment, before his ration would expire and he’d have to get a second punch on his card for overdrawing. He was tempted—he’d never tasted anything so full of life and flavor. He pressed his tongue against her arm and held it for three extra beats, letting his saliva seal the wounds. Then, instead of wiping her arm with the clean towel or leaving her to do it, he carefully ran his tongue around the area until every trace of sap was gone. He didn’t want to waste even half a drop. She was too delicious.

“How many years have you had now, Aspen?” he asked.

She cleaned her arm with alcohol and a practiced indifference. When he spoke, her eyes darted up, and then back down, but her face didn’t show any reaction. “It’s Cali.”

He had forgotten why he’d come in for a moment, that he had work to do. He leaned across the table. “Unless I can rent you for…personal use.”

“Use for what?” she asked, watching him more closely now.

He slid his hand up the inside of her thigh, further than he liked. Now that he’d eaten, touching her was unpleasant. He shouldn’t touch her at all, except to look for a new spot to draw from. The bouncer cleared his throat and Draven took his hand away, but he remained leaning across the table towards Cali. “For…my pleasure.”

He detected a change in her flat eyes, a withdrawing further, a cold disgust that hadn’t been there before. A strange sense of disappointment settled over him, one he shouldn’t feel over a sap’s reaction to him. He had a moment to briefly regret propositioning her, to think he should have come back and picked another sap next time and tested her instead.

That was a ridiculous notion. What did it matter what any sap thought of him? They were all the same. And business was business. He had a job to do, and he had found a new favorite, so it made sense to eat and check the restaurant at the same time.

Cali looked at her bouncer and nodded towards the door. Draven stood and accepted his ration card, punched for one use. The proposition was the most unpleasant thing about his new job. The perks far outweighed the slight discomfort of touching the saps, though. He got to drive around all night listening to music, eating at regular intervals, and sometimes helping a sad sap or two. He liked being able to do something that helped someone, even if it was just a sap. He got a rush from busting a restaurant with diseased saps, or, more often, overdrawn or mistreated ones. Especially when the restaurants served saplings. That in itself disgusted him, although he knew several Superiors who preferred the thin taste of young saps.

Before leaving, Draven turned back to the bouncer as if in afterthought. “You don’t have any saps who can be, let’s say, borrowed for a bit, do you?”

The bouncer stared him down with cool distaste. “We’re not that kind of establishment.”

“Do you happen to know anywhere I can find a sap for rent, perhaps for just an hour or so?”

“I don’t. I’ve heard things about 28 Flavors, but they close before the other restaurants so you’d have to hurry. And I don’t know anything for sure. That’s just what I’ve heard.”

“
Merci.”

Draven didn’t care for the looks he got from the bouncers and the reputation that would invariably follow him after asking at all the restaurants. But it was a small price to pay for the luxury of taking the time to choose carefully and the variety he could choose from at every meal—priceless advantages in his routine life. It was almost enough to make him forget the pittance he received at the end of each night’s work.

He left Estrella’s without looking back, his mind already racing ahead to his next stop, which sounded promising. The prospect of a bust made the job exciting. He pulled away from the curb, his hunger temporarily sated, already having forgotten Cali.

Chapter Four

He remembered her the next night, though, and the next, and every night after. Every night he should have visited five different restaurants, but he had to save one of his rations for Cali. He couldn’t bear to miss something so delicious.

Sometimes Cali appeared drowsy, and she sat relaxed, like she hardly felt his teeth piercing her vein. Sometimes when he came, he found her sleeping, as many of the saps did between customers. When she slept, he didn’t wake her, but took her arm and put it to his mouth and drew on it until he’d had his ration. He knew she was probably awake, except on the nights when he noted the unpleasant aftertaste of drugs in her bloodstream.

Some of the kinder Superiors used drugs to calm the saps and ease their pain. Some Superiors even preferred the taste, having gotten so used to it that sap without the addition of pharmaceuticals tasted strange to them. Draven had never been able to tolerate the foreign taste, despite his sympathy for saps’ pain. He disliked drugs the same way he disliked the preserved sap sold in stores and at bars. Even warmed, it lacked the taste of life, the fresh vitality of sap direct from the source.

One night Draven went to Estrella’s after his shift, just before closing time. He’d had a busy night—he’d reported a restaurant overdrawing its saps, and he’d stayed most of the night with the team of Enforcers who came to confiscate the weak and nearly lifeless sapiens.

He entered Estrella’s to find Cali sleeping on her arm. He took her other arm and held her elbow in his palm while he massaged her upper arm. Hair stuck to her face when she sat up and blinked at him. She brushed it away and then, clearly without thinking, reached both her arms above her head and curled her whole body into a stretch. Her bouncer stepped forward and crushed her arm down on the table.

She winced and looked at Draven and bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Master,” she said quickly. “I was half asleep. I meant no offense or disrespect, sir. I apologize.”

“It’s alright,” he said, taking her arm in his hands and resuming his preparation. She looked at him, studying him, like she was trying to figure if he was angry. “Really,” he assured her with a small smile. Saps were always so frightened, like his aim was to hurt them instead of just to sustain himself.

She offered a tentative smile and sighed. “Thanks.”

“I’m not a horrible person who wants to hurt you,” he said, shaking his head and flicking her vein. It bulged suddenly, beautiful and pulsing with life. His teeth throbbed a painful stab deep into the root. “I have to eat, and then I will speak with you,” he said. He lowered his head and buried his teeth in the relief of her nourishment.

Some of the saps babbled while he drank, and some whimpered, and once in a while, one screamed. Some, like Cali, remained silent, and he liked this best. When he finished, he closed the two small punctures and turned her arm to gently lick away the last traces of sap, his tongue and lips moving over her warm skin. He felt her shiver and lifted his head to look at her. “Are you sick?” he asked, remembering that common symptom of sapien illness.

“Your mouth is just awfully cold. Most of you don’t…linger.”

“I apologize,” he said, releasing her arm. “Does it cause you severe discomfort?” He had forgotten that saps were bothered by temperature change. They could even die from it. Of course, saps could die of any little thing, or nothing at all.

“Of course. I can taste anything you’ve eaten or drank or taken, or even that you are of breeding age, unlike the first time I drew from you.”

She squirmed and put her knees together. He didn’t know what to think of this delicious little sap. She didn’t seem much different from any other sap, and yet… She looked like she was experiencing a sort of embarrassment. But he must have been mistaken. Saps weren’t intelligent enough to experience this sensation.

Chapter Five

Auction night always excited Ander—even more so when he had some anyas in his pocket. He prided himself on the thoroughness of his inspections and his selectiveness. He wanted the best of the best, and today he could choose two saps. Business boomed if you just picked the right business, and he had. After all, everybody had to eat.

He walked along the platform looking over the livestock. He’d read a book once about the slave trade in human times, about how slave owners tested to see if slaves were healthy, and he’d borrowed a few of their techniques. Slaves were just homo-sapiens, after all, and that’s what he needed. Some healthy saps that would last for a good many years in his restaurants. Of course, the ones who didn’t do so good could always be sent down to South End, where no one cared if saps were healthy or not.

Ander stopped and looked over a young sap. She had long legs and a pretty face, good hair. She smelled nice, too, and he guessed her age to be pushing twenty.

“Open your mouth,” he said, and felt inside when she obeyed. He ran his hands over her bare skin and took in all the smells of her. When he had finished he nodded to one of the attendants and the woman stepped forward to record Ander’s bid in the system. He bid on two more saps and then moved back and sat in the audience, watching the screens where the saps’ numbers scrolled along, the highest bidders changing now and then.

It sure beat the old auctions where people had to yell out bids. Like most things, auctioning had gotten a whole lot better when Superiors set things up. Of course he’d heard the old saying about how it had taken Superiors a hundred years to wreck everything humans had built, and a hundred more to put it back exactly as it had been. Ander didn’t agree with that, but then, he’d never been around when humans ran things, so he didn’t know for sure.