Alpha’s Kitty Page 10

  I don’t know if it was born from a lifetime of being used, but I had a strong sense that nothing about this situation was right. I wanted to get out of the vehicle, but we began to move and I knew I had to simply sit through this fear and find out what lay ahead.

  Chapter 15

  Kitty

  “Road block!” the driver called. “Everybody get down. Lay flat on the floor.”

  In a flurry of movement, all six of us got down into the bottom of the vehicle while it slowed. I held my breath, sure every other woman was doing the same thing.

  If the enforcers found us, they probably wouldn’t waste time tracing our owners or reuniting us with them. Even if they did, Najia had told me all about the severe penalties for runaway slaves.

  “Departure permit?” An enforcer asked.

  “We’re on special orders,” the driver replied. There was a bleep as something was electronically scanned.

  “That appears to be in order. Good journey.” The enforcer must have stepped away because the vehicle began moving again.

  It was only when we were back on the road, and I was sitting again, that I realized I’d had the opportunity to ask the enforcers for help. I hadn’t taken it. Whatever was concerning me about this was less bad than the terrifying prospect of talking to an enforcer or being taken into custody. I’d rather take my chances with the unknown.

  The bottom line was, I trusted the resistance more than I trusted the system. That realization eased my jitters about whatever was to come. After all, any freedom had to be better than none, right?

  * * *

  Kitty

  “We’re here.”

  The vehicle had stopped for the first time in hours. The sun had set long ago, and the planet’s twin moons illuminated the sky. The doors were opened and new faces smiled at us. I gave a slight wave, but I was way too sleepy to be very friendly.

  “Welcome! Welcome! We’re so glad you could make it! Three transports arrived this time!” A woman’s voice, full of joy, sang out. We all got out of the vehicle and I did some quick math.

  “What happened to the other three transports?” I asked. There was a slight waver in my stomach, from years of knowing better than to ask questions, but my newfound confidence stopped me from apologizing.

  “They got ambushed by renegades,” the driver explained quietly. “Everyone gets taken, even the drivers, but they leave the vehicles.”

  For the first time, I realized how dangerous the journey had been.

  “Thank you for risking your life to get us here,” I said to the driver. The other women jumped in almost as soon as I’d said it.

  “Yes, thank you,” they murmured individually.

  “I’m glad you made it back, Varen,” the woman murmured, and I realized they were more than comrades. A look passed between them, then she turned to us and smiled. “I’m Telicia, and I’m one of the many people who lives at the commune. We’ll show you around in the morning, but for now, I’ll take you to the patio where we eat, and you can all share in our evening meal.”

  She opened a metal gate and we were led into a single-story building. The entrance hall was wide and airy, and the lighting felt comforting; a world away from the stark luminescent strips that had burned day and night in the safehouse.

  There were doors leading to other places but we went through into a courtyard sort of area, surrounded by buildings on all four sides, where there were long tables and benches. People were sitting and eating. All of them wore clothes. I looked down at my own bare body and felt out of place.

  “Come. Sit. Eat.” Telicia gestured to the table. The women from my vehicle sat in a little cluster and I joined them, suddenly too shy to approach anyone else.

  Soup was brought, with bread rolls, and I ate mine readily. One of the things Najia had taught me was kitties didn’t have to eat kitty food, and I’d enjoyed trying all the new foods we’d eaten in the safehouse. Our meals had been simple but good.

  Accommodation was in dorms, just like at the safehouse, but everyone had a bed. The moment I lay on mine with a full belly, I was asleep. Apparently, all my fears about this place had been unfounded.

  * * *

  Hervé

  Kitty had been gone for five weeks when I decided to take another leaf from Sherlock Holmes’ book. He was a master of disguise, often dressing as a beggar to gain access to places a well-to-do Victorian gentleman couldn’t go.

  That was why, right now, I was disguised as a slave. I had shaved my head completely, changed my stance, spent sixty minutes in a photoluminous unit until my skin was several shades darker, and used thirty-day tattoos to decorate the side of my face and across my chest, so I looked like one of the savages from the tribes. The tattoos also made it difficult for people to recognize my face shape. The only thing that marked me as Alpha was the access chip embedded in my little finger, which only members of Command Central had.

  I summoned Bertrand to the study.

  “You look like... like... why, Master?” The expression of utter bemusement on his face was priceless.

  “I’m joining the resistance,” I replied.

  Bertrand’s mouth fell open and I struggled not to laugh at his response. “Do you need a medic, Master?”

  “No. I’m going to find the resistance by being a slave near a bombing.”

  “How will that work, Master?”

  “You will pose as my master. We will wait in the financial district, where all the current attacks are taking place, and as soon as we are aware of a bomb detonating, we will go straight to the building and get separated. If enforcers catch me, you will need to intervene and tell them you’re my master. If all goes well, I should be able to infiltrate the resistance and find their base.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then I go to plan C. I’ll get enforcers to seal off every sector of the city, round up every citizen, and interrogate them until we find Dorèl Shreve.” I wasn’t afraid of razing the entire city to the ground to rid us of the scourge of the terrorists. I would prefer not to, though, because I had no wish to relocate the planet’s administration or to designate another first city.

  * * *

  Hervé

  “There. Did you hear it?” I looked down the street we stood on for traces of the explosion I’d just heard.

  “No ma—no.”

  Bertrand was still struggling with his role. It made sense, since he had been my assistant and closest employee for over a decade, but I needed him to act more like a master.

  “Follow me. From in front.”

  We’d had to practice this. Of course, slaves couldn’t walk ahead of their masters, so Bertrand had to take the lead.

  Walking through the streets, we quickly found a banking headquarters with a smoking hole in it. This bomb was quite small compared to some of the others.

  “I’m going around the corner. Follow me in sixty seconds,” I told him. He pointedly stared up at the building, to seem distracted, while I walked around the building looking for the resistance. On a side road, I saw three men wearing black hooded tops. They looked very suspicious.

  If this was the resistance, how had the enforcers never noticed them? I hovered around the building, shifting my stance and allowing myself a moment of uncertainty, while I hovered around what looked like the staff entrance to the bank.

  When the door opened, I saw a fully-clothed young woman leading two slaves out.

  “We’re just going to the vehi—oh.” She stopped and stared at me.

  I kept my gaze low, my hands clasped before me as I tried to look subdued.

  “I was on an errand when I saw the explosion,” I mumbled.

  “Come with us, before the enforcers see you,” she said, with a big smile. She reminded me of those people who used to start cults, before we stamped out religion across the planet.

  “Thank you.”

  The men in hoods turned to greet us as we approached, but before they said anything, Bertrand’s voice called out f
rom behind me.

  “Slave! Stop!”

  I cringed inwardly. His situational judgement was apparently too poor for the task I’d given him. He was only supposed to intervene if enforcers were accosting me.

  “Your master?” the woman asked, misreading my reaction as fear.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “There are no ma’ams or masters in our world,” she said gently. I wondered how many slaves they peddled this to.

  “Kill the master,” one of the men said, and when he turned around, I realized I was face to face with the man I’d been hunting for the past five weeks—Dorèl Shreve. He looked exactly like his wanted poster.

  Dorèl narrowed his eyes at Bertrand. “Actually, bring him with us. He’s the assistant to the Alpha. He can be useful leverage.”

  I decided the best thing to do was to stand very still and look fearful. It went against every instinct in my body but I needed to reach the headquarters so we could flush out the nest of resistance and ensure the city was free from their filthy ideology.

  The three hooded men grabbed Bertrand and bundled him into the vehicle.

  “Come, we will take you somewhere safe,” the woman said. “I am Najia. Do any of you have names?”

  The girls shook their heads and I followed suit. Pretending to be a meek slave was exhausting when I wanted to crush all their skulls.

  The whole time we were moving, I tried to figure out what the best thing to do was. Bertrand shouldn’t have gotten brought with us, and now he had the potential to endanger the outcome of my plan. Worse, they might change their minds about killing him. The terrorists had no compunction about bombing buildings, it was very unlikely they would balk at killing Bertrand if they decided he was more useful dead than alive. It would send a powerful message across the planet, if they had captured and killed the aide to the planet’s Alpha. I was surprised they hadn’t recognized me, but my disguise had been carefully designed to make me blend in.

  We were taken to the concrete parking lot where I’d watched Dorèl appear and disappear time and time again. I felt like I was on the verge of solving one of the biggest mysteries about this whole thing.

  “We’re here. Everybody out.”

  I stood in the dingy concrete lot once more, and instead of feeling elated, my gut churned. It was very unlike me, and I blamed it on the role I was playing. Dorèl roughly manhandled Bertrand, kicking him and dragging him across the concrete like an animal, and it took all my self-control not to intervene.

  “It bothers you, doesn’t it?” Najia said from my shoulder. I looked at her with a little trepidation, trying to show I was still fearful.

  “He is my master. It’s difficult to watch people hurting him.”

  “That’s because you’re not like them. The masters treat slaves like this all the time, don’t they? We are all trained to tune it out, when a slave is being beaten, or raped, or murdered. We call it discipline. The master’s inviolable right to do what he wishes with his property. But people are still being hurt.”

  I wasn’t sure what I’d expected from being down here, but I was surprised by how true her words were. Watching slaves being harmed had become normal. Masters were allowed to do whatever they wanted, and as a free man, it had sometimes bothered me to watch particularly brutal displays of dominance, but I had always seen that as my own weakness. Society told us strong men could do anything to their slaves and weak men feared to inflict suffering, but what if it wasn’t about strength of character? What if it was moral fiber and compassion?

  My thoughts churned as we were led across the parking lot to what I’d thought was a janitor’s closet. Inside, it opened into a huge hideout hidden behind thick concrete. That was how Dorèl had vanished despite the biomarkers.

  “Welcome to the resistance,” Dorèl said. “Please take a seat on the furniture. There are no masters here, and no punishments. I encourage you all to choose a name. We will be moving you to our commune, outside the city, in one week.”

  The missing slaves were being taken out of the city? How was that possible?

  “Aren’t there enforcer checkpoints?” I asked, wondering if a slave would have raised their hand or something, first.

  “Yes. But we have a little help from a sympathizer in Command Central.”

  A mole? Someone in my key leadership team was aiding in trafficking slaves?

  “That’s... unbelievable,” I said, when I realized he was waiting for a reply.

  “There are many in the city and across the planet who don’t agree with the way slaves are being purpose bred and brought here for the entertainment of people with more money,” Najia explained.

  I nodded mutely, and listened as Dorèl described this commune we were apparently going to. It sounded like an escaped slave’s paradise, and far too good to be true.

  Chapter 16

  Kitty

  The commune was the most incredible place I’d ever lived. Everyone was equal, and I adored my new daily routine. When I awoke, I washed, then went to breakfast. We took turns to get up earlier than everyone else and cook the morning’s porridge.

  After breakfast, we went to do our chores. Mine was to take care of the poultry; collecting eggs, cleaning their area, feeding them... it was a fun task because I talked to them the whole time. Once our chores were done, we had free time.

  Free time was when I practiced reading, did exercise with the other women, and made friends. There were men, here, too, but I tended to avoid them, and anyway, our sleeping areas were segregated unless we had chosen to couple with someone.

  Coupling was confusing, here. The first time I saw Tasha go with Canem, the wolf-man who had been with us at the safehouse, I thought they were together, now. But she’d come to our dorm late at night and slept in her own bed.

  Night after night, the same thing happened. I didn’t understand it at all, so today, I decided to ask her about it while we were doing stretching exercises.

  “Tasha?” I began, feeling very awkward for bringing it up.

  “Hmm?”

  “Are you and Canem together, now?”

  She frowned and looked confused. “Together? Like master and slave?”

  “I suppose.” Maybe I didn’t have enough words to explain what I meant properly. “But more like equals, I mean.”

  “I don’t think it’s possible for a man and woman to be together and be truly equal,” she replied. We’d heard this several times, first from Najia and then from Telicia. It seemed to be something everyone here believed. I didn’t see how some silly concept of ‘true’ equality had anything to do with whether a man and a woman had gotten together or not. Of course, they couldn’t be equal. Was that supposed to stop us from falling in love, just in case we ended up enslaved to someone again?

  “So... what do you two do together, then?” I asked, more and more confused.

  “We have sex,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Then we go to bed.”

  I sighed. “I don’t think I’m ever going to understand the mystery of males.”

  “What’s to understand. They need sex, we need sex, none of us need to live in the same room or pledge ourselves to one another. If I get bored of Canem, I’ll move onto one of the other males, and vice-versa. You’ve had sex, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  A memory of the last time my master had fucked me suddenly swept me away, and my body tingled as I relived the moment his cock had entered my ass. It hadn’t been equal, and I’d never really signed up to be his slave, but I missed him profoundly.

  I sighed from my toes as sorrow filled my heart so full it began to rain in my chest cavity.

  “You left someone behind?” Tasha deduced.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “You’ll find someone new. Why don’t you ask Canem for a fuck? He’s pretty good at it,” Tasha suggested. My eyes widened.

  “Wouldn’t you be jealous?” I managed.

  “Not really. Jealousy implies ownership.”


  I finished my exercise and sat under a tree in the sunshine to read a book. I was staring at the words but my mind was ruminating on memories of my master. I didn’t want sex with some random man in the commune. There had been a deep soul-connection between my master and me, and I didn’t think anything in the universe would ever heal it. I didn’t want to heal it; I wanted my master.

  * * *

  Hervé

  I’d been at the safehouse for two days and I realized my task was far more complicated than I’d thought. The resistance, who we had been searching for since the first bomb exploded two years ago, believed the government were detonating the explosions around the city.

  Dorèl and his idealistic band of friends were simply opportunity-grabbing the slaves and ‘liberating’ them with the outdated communist ideology of Karl Marx. Whenever he quoted Marx, it took all my self-control not to counter his arguments with fifty of my own.

  I wanted to shake everyone here and defend the way the world was—the way every planet in our system was—but while their solutions didn’t seem quite right, I was forced to concede that mine weren’t, either.

  I wanted to get names, locations, but everything seemed so compartmentalized. Whoever was really running the resistance, their bombers were kept so separate to these idealists that I needed to get higher in the organization; closer to the top. I wondered if there were answers at the commune, where we were going in a few more days.

  Command Central would get us back out as soon as I contacted them and proved who I was, and while the people here were being hard on Bertrand, it was nothing he couldn’t handle—slaves put up with far worse every day. When we were done here, I decided it was time some laws on the treatment of sentient slaves were written.