Hidden Faults (14 page)

My fellow inmates suffered as a result. We had four paras in our team, not including me, and the day after Ganwe ‘milked’ me, one of them disappeared into the storeroom. Not for sex, since no other man followed him. He didn’t emerge until lunchtime, when one of the others came to drag him out—’drag’ being the operative word, since the fellow could barely stand. After lunch, which couldn’t be avoided because of the mandatory headcounts, he went back to the storeroom.

He looked even worse when he emerged at the end of the shift. The following day was a ‘rest day’ where the guards took us to a large hall with daylight simulating lamps and sports equipment, allowing us to freely socialise and get a little exercise. The para going through withdrawal spent it curled up in a corner, shivering and crying. No one went near him.

I couldn’t watch him all day—Ganwe had plans for me that kept me busy half the time—but when I wasn’t sitting against a wall cursing my ‘owner’ and trying to forget the unwanted feel and taste of men who’d hired me, I kept an eye on the guy. I thought I should check on him, but to what point? I couldn’t do what he needed, which was to top up his implant, and I had none of the jozidem we used to give to paranormal volunteers to ease the symptoms. I didn’t think he’d thank me for concern that offered no real benefit.

And Ganwe didn’t like me talking to people. He had other ‘boys’ he controlled, but I was the only one he kept on such a short leash. It meant I couldn’t make any friends, or get a sense of how things worked, or talk to the other paras about how they coped. I could only hope that he might relax a little more once he realised I had no intention of trying to slip his control—no point, after all. I’d already seen one incident in the canteen where an unowned ‘boy’ had been mobbed by some of the more experienced hands. When I saw him next, he was a mess, crying and bruised. I didn’t need to ask him what had happened. By evening, he trailed around behind one of the bosses, being treated like shit—the penalty for not making the right choice, apparently.

I convinced myself that I would cope better with withdrawal because I knew what to expect. I was such an arrogant shitting fool. It crept up on me. I started work in the garden as usual, making the water checks, feeling more than usually tired, hoping the day would be a quiet one and no one would be in the mood for sex. My first day had been one of the worst for that—Ganwe showing off the goods, probably—but there hadn’t been a single day when I hadn’t been told to follow one or other of the team, or to service someone in the showers, or in the exercise room. I was slowly getting used to it, but I still hated it, most of all because it had once been something I’d enjoyed.

About an hour after we’d started the shift, my stomach started to cramp. A minute or so later, I doubled over, hardly able to breathe for the pain, holding onto one of the plant racks so I didn’t fall over. I heard someone running off, thudding, rubber footsteps on the concrete, and a little after that, Ganwe’s voice and his hand on my neck.

“Okay, boy, you sick or you withdrawing?”

“Don’t know,” I gasped.

He felt my forehead, read the pulse in my neck like he was the doctor, not me. Then he put his arm around my waist and made me stand up. I could barely see him for the pain tears.

“First time’s the worst. You come with me, I’ll make sure you’re safe.”

I hated him for doing this to me in the first place, I hated him for pretending to care, I hated that everyone could see me and know what was going on with me. But I let him haul me to the storeroom, and tuck me up against some boxes. I was so cold and in so much pain, I couldn’t think at all. I just wanted it to stop.

“Please...help me.” I fumbled towards him, grabbing the front of his overalls. “Make it stop.”

“I can’t, Jodi. I’m sorry. I’ll make sure no one bothers you. Best thing is you sleep it off.”

Sleep? Was he joking? I was shivering so hard I thought my bones would crack. He stood up and walked off. I wanted to call out and make him come back, but my mouth wouldn’t work.

Those few hours were the worst I’d ever experienced in my life. Somehow I had to get up and go to the canteen at lunchtime. I didn’t recall much about that. I couldn’t eat, I remembered that, and leaning up against Ganwe, so desperate for any source of heat because I couldn’t get warm. I did manage to spend some of the afternoon asleep, but I woke up dry heaving.

Ganwe didn’t even try to take me to the canteen that night for supper. He must have bribed a guard or something because they took me back to the cell where I lay on the lower bunk, retching and shaking and seriously wanting to die.

Precious little concession was made to my suffering, though Ganwe did his best according to his nature. He made me get up off his bunk and climb into my own, even though I couldn’t stand at that point and he had to boost me up the ladder like a geriatric with arthritic hips. But he produced an extra blanket from somewhere, and stroked my forehead for a bit, nice until I remembered who was doing it and I snarled at him to fuck off. I was sorry when he stopped, but I couldn’t forgive him. The guards hadn’t needed the naksen, but I did. Ganwe had stolen it from me and made me like this.

For three days I endured this, with no noticeable improvement, even though in theory there should have been some very slight change for the better. Naksen had been designed this nastily to enforce compliance, and to debilitate those who didn’t keep the levels up, but even so, the addictive agent only lasted for a few days before its effect wore off. The suppressant effect on my powers would last for at least seven days, possibly longer. I was one of the lucky ones who was particularly sensitive to naksen, and so withdrawal was especially severe.

When they finally dragged me to the medical wing to be topped up, I could hardly sit still, waiting for the drug to enter my system, disgusted at my eagerness but helpless to stop my reaction. The medic sneered at me as he removed the autoinjector, shorting me once more. Did he really imagine himself superior to me because I’d been forced into an addiction he fed in other people?

The replenished naksen worked fast. I was almost back to normal when I returned to the cell. Or as normal as I could be. I found if I wasn’t doing anything too mentally challenging, the slowness of my thoughts didn’t hinder me too much. It was only if I attempted anything remotely complex that I remembered I couldn’t do that any more.

Ganwe was waiting for me. “Now, Jodi, you know what I want.”

I pushed him away and fled to the other side of the cell. “No! I’m not going through that again! I’ll kill you!”

He was on me in a second, pushing me against the wall, his hand around my neck, squeezing, ignoring my struggling as if I was nothing more than a toy.

“Kill me? You ever killed a man, Jodi boy? I don’t think you have. Don’t think you could neither. Killing takes guts, doing it up close like this. You have to be ready for the sound. You have to want to hear the noise a dying man makes, and know you’re the one that done it.”

Suddenly he let me go. I gasped, trying to get air back into my throat. “But if you got the guts, you do it. I ain’t gonna fight ya.”

He stood there, massive hands harmlessly at his sides, but I knew he wouldn’t let me do it, even if I had the guts, like he said.

“I can’t go through that again. Ganwe, I haven’t eaten in days. If I have to do that every week, there’ll be nothing left of me. I’ll die and you’ll have to get some other sucker to rob.”

He shrugged. “Fresh meat comes in, fresh meat goes. Up to you if you can make it or not. I gotta pay them guards thirty myclits, and it’s gotta come from you.”

“Thirty! Fifteen weeks? No...please, Ganwe, don’t do this.”

He shoved me against the wall again. “I gotta. Can’t let fresh meat tell me what to do. ‘Sides, a deal’s a deal. I don’t want to hurt you to get that stuff, but I will if I have to.” He searched my face. “I don’t got a choice. It’s me or you, and I gotta pick me. No one else will. You ain’t lived like that, and I’m sorry. But fact’s a fact.” He stood away. “Now you choose—easy or hard.”

I rolled up my sleeve and stuck my arm out at him, turning my face away from him so I didn’t need to watch him or what he did. The extraction took less than a minute, and the handover to the guard completed as quickly as before.

I climbed up into my bunk, intending to ignore him completely, but he touched my shoulder.

“What? Don’t tell me you want me to suck you off after all that?”

Something hit the blanket in front of my face—a bar of cheap candy. “You missed your supper. Lights out in...twenty minutes. Let it go, Jodi.”

I pretended I hadn’t heard him or seen the candy bar, but when I heard him get onto his own bed, I tore the paper wrapper open and wolfed down the sweet, overflavoured thing. Now I was no longer in withdrawal, my appetite had come back, and I was starving.

“If you had to go through this, you’d never do it to someone else,” I said to the ceiling.

“If you came from my world, you’d know what a shitting stupid thing you said to me. Go to sleep.”

For the first time since I’d been assigned to this cell, I thought I’d managed to make him genuinely angry. That didn’t give me as much satisfaction as it might have done a few days ago.

~~~

The withdrawal felt no easier the next time or the time after that, despite Ganwe’s prediction that it would be. The only benefit was that I found it physically impossible to service anyone sexually. He didn’t even try to make me, a small but unexpected mercy. I didn’t argue with him when he told me to present my arm for ‘milking’ the next time—but if I’d expected him to be guilty in the least about it, I was bound to be disappointed. Guilt wasn’t a Ganwe thing.

I was right about one thing—I
would
die if he kept this up, or at least become ill. The weight stripped off me even in three weeks, and all his little gifts of sweets and the occasional piece of fruit, didn’t make up for not being able to eat in the throes of withdrawal. I didn’t think he wanted me to die—but I wasn’t worth antagonising the guards over. There would be other pretty paras coming along to replace me if I conked out on him.

My desperation at my situation finally drove me to making one of my allowed calls to my parents. That was a mistake. My mother answered, and as soon as she realised who it was, closed the call. I didn’t get a chance to utter a word, but I’d still used up my allowance for that week—no retry or alternative permitted.

After that, I didn’t have the heart to try anyone else. If Timo rejected me that way...no. I could survive Mam’s bigotry because it didn’t surprise me. If Timo turned out to be like her, it’d kill me. I didn’t want to destroy my memories of a friendship so precious by a reality that ugly.

I thought that would end my contact with the outside world, but I was wrong. Two days after that abortive call, a guard came to the farm to collect me. Not, as I thought, to drag me to the medical wing, but because I had a visitor. He gave me no details, only telling me I could refuse to see the person or I could come out and talk to them. Those being my choices, of course I wanted to see them.

I was pretty sure I knew who it would be. Trepidation collided painfully with hope as I submitted to a search, and then they allowed me into the visitors room—an ugly bare room that, in theory, could allow a hundred prisoners or more to speak to their loved ones at scuffed, dirty tables divided by wooden partitions. Today, there were only half a dozen prisoners and anonymous civilians waiting to see them. I was so slow in my thought processes these days that when I didn’t see the person I’d expected, I couldn’t recognise at first which one of the visitors had come for me.

Ajeile recognised me though. “Jodi!”

She waved madly at me. The guard directed me to one of the tables and another guard brought her over to me. She reached for my hand across the table.

“Marra—what have they done to you? Your hair—and you’re so thin.”

In my shock, it took me some moments to find my voice. “A-Ajeile.”

She looked so damn normal—just as she had the last time I'd seen her in the office. Her eyes were red, but otherwise she was the same, even down to the pale green blouse and plum jacket.

“Wh-what are you...why are you here?”

“Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“I’m...staggered. Pleased. But why? Why you? I mean—” I stopped, not wanting to admit out loud that no one else had been in touch at all.

“Because....” She shifted uneasily. “I’m sorry it took so long to arrange it. I had to get official clearance and that took weeks. But now....” She made the effort to smile, though the shock of my much changed appearance lingered in her eyes. “It’s good to see you, Jodi. I’ve been so worried. No one knew anything about where you were or what happened to you. Except Arwe Kregan, and he made an announcement that you’d been arrested and were no longer working with us.”

I could only blink at her. “Wait—so how did you find out what happened to me? Or where I was?”

She blushed suddenly, turning the most extraordinary colour. “I...um....”

“Ajeile, what did you do?”

“Please don’t be angry with me.”

I resisted the urge to lean over and shake her. “I won’t. I’m just confused.”

“I told Kregan you were my fiancé.” The words spilled out in a rush, and her cheeks reddened further. “I had to, Jodi, or they—” She bit her lip.