Glitter (Glitter Duology #1)(80)

“Why not?”

“Saber, you—”

“Nothing has changed, Danica. I’m the same person, living the same life.” He pauses, his face a tableau of sharp angles. “You still have a job to do, and, quite frankly, so do I.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What good would it have done?” he whispers.

“I don’t understand. It can’t be legal.”

“Says the person selling drugs.”

I step back like he’s slapped me across the face, but he’s not wrong. “I don’t…how? What happened?”

He shrugs as though it doesn’t matter. “My family lived in Eastern Mongolia until I was eight. When the East Asia Conflict got bad, we fled—us, and a million others. We did better than most, got as far as Paris before we ran out of money. Reginald found us sleeping in an alley and said he could get my family to North America—at a price.”

“You were the price.”

He nods. “Made sense, really. I have four younger siblings. Add in my parents and it was a choice between saving six people and letting seven people starve. We weren’t here legally—no papers, no money. Altan wasn’t even two yet. I don’t…” He hesitates. “I don’t fault them,” he says, more emotion creeping into his recitation now. “They didn’t have any good choices.”

“Ten years.” It’s not really a question, simply me doing the math. “And you never tried to—”

“Run away?” Saber asks with a bitter edge that makes my chest hurt. “You ever studied slavery? In any culture? Running rarely works out very well.”

“But you’re here. Can’t I…I don’t know, put you on a plane to somewhere?” I rush forward when he starts to protest. “I’m sure Lord Aaron and I could arrange it. I can use some of my earnings. You’d be on a different continent before Reginald even knew you were gone.”

“Stop!” Saber says, his hands on my upper arms. “You think I haven’t considered it? You think I haven’t thought about all of this before? I’m not stupid.”

“Of course not,” I say. Almost plead. I just want to get him out of this situation. It makes me sick!

He pushes his shoulders back and slips out of the tight livery jacket. I realize what he’s doing when he starts unbuttoning the cuffs of his linen shirt, and my heart starts to pound. I know what’s there. But now, comprehending the significance of it, I can hardly bear it.

He pushes the shirt up, and I look more closely at the black mark. It’s ten years old, but the lines are still crisp and dark.

“It’s code,” he says softly. “People with the equipment to decrypt it can see my…status. My name, who owns me. There are markings that can be added to say something about my skills, indicate that I’m for sale, even list a price. People like Reginald have diverse interests—drugs, counterfeiting, smuggling, you name it. And every single one of them is careful to the point of paranoia. The slave markings are one way they’ve found to do business without saying a single, possibly incriminating word.”

It doesn’t sound paranoid to me at all—it sounds insanely brazen. Tattooing sensitive information onto a human being, even encrypted, sounds like a recipe for disaster. It’s so open. So obvious.

“So we get the tattoo removed. I’ll take you to the clinic right now. Move-ins are often asked to have visible tattoos removed for historical accuracy.”

“You don’t understand, Danica. The tattoo doesn’t make me a slave; it keeps me alive. Look,” he says, pushing his right ear forward with an index finger so I can see behind it. “Do you see that scar?”

“I…” At first I don’t, but on closer inspection, I can see a wrinkle that might once have been an incision, just where his jawline and earlobe meet. “Maybe?”

“Well, Reginald’s plastic surgeons are some of the best in the world.” Saber grimaces. “There’s a chip in there. If it doesn’t pick up the right authorization codes at the right time, it cooks my brain. The tattoo is a part of that process; the slaveminder—”

“Slaveminder,” I repeat, my world swirling into a sickening surrealism I can’t escape.

“It’s a bot, just nowhere near as fancy as the ones you’ve got here. It scans my tat and blasts whatever it is my chip wants to hear. Then I’m safe for a while, but I’m never told how long I have before my next check-in comes due. It’s why I sometimes meet with Reginald alone on the weekends.”

I remember thinking yesterday that I didn’t know how dark Reginald’s underground world was. But this? “The police…” But the look of amusement on Saber’s face makes my words trail off.

“Oh, they know. Some, anyway. But as far as they’re concerned, all this tattoo means is that if they take me into custody, I’ll be dead before I can be of use to them. Doesn’t matter if they’re trying to liberate me, or arrest me, or use me to get to my…employer. The markings are a warning to leave me alone.”

I’m aghast, but my brain automatically shifts into coder mode. “Can’t you…hack the chip? Get it removed? Surely someone—”

“Surely,” Saber interrupts with a bitter chuckle, “someone, somewhere, is working on some way to fight the gangs, and the mobs, and the cartels. To free the slaves, to stop the drugs, to tax the smugglers. That’s always true. But the chip in my head is designed to fry me at the first hint of tampering. You can probably imagine that there aren’t a lot of slaves out there volunteering to beta-test solution proposals.”