Instead, I stood calmly, waiting patiently while the woman finished tapping at her console. She asked me to press my hand against a panel,which glowed and then beeped, and I assumed it was a biometric scanner of some sort. Then she hopped down off the stool to go and fetch a clean uniform. She looked me up and down when she got back, and I felt a little taken aback at being so frankly appraised by someone who was only slightly taller than my knee. “Lieutenant, you’re a size fifty-two, correct?” she asked, craning her neck back to look up at us, and my master nodded. “I got Kade a fifty-four. He’s a little taller than you, but not by much. Hopefully that should fit. And there’s a hygiene kit there as well. Soap, toothpaste, all that sort of stuff,” she said to me, holding out the bundle.
I took it, thanking her, then my master led me down yet more hallways, until we came to a stop in front of one particular door. There was some kind of symbol on it, but I couldn’t read it.
“This is your room,” my master announced. “You open the door by putting your hand here.” He indicated the glass panel beside the door. I did so, and the door slid open, revealing a small, sparse room that contained a single bed, a nightstand and a dresser. That was it. I was suddenly glad he’d already told me he had a villa elsewhere in the city. Living out of this gloomy little room for the rest of my life would have been… daunting.
“My room is that one,” he said, pointing to the one to the left. “And the bathroom is across the hall. You can take a shower, then get some sleep. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. I’ll come and get you in the morning when it’s time for breakfast. Do you have any questions?”
“Are there any regulations as to where I should keep my weapons?” I asked. I’d noticed that my master had returned his to a locker when we’d arrived at this base, and it seemed an important enough detail to bother him with it.
He flinched, as if he’d forgotten I had them. “Either keep them in your room with the door locked, or on your person. I’ll have to talk to Henderson tomorrow about what we’re going to do longer term. Anything else?”
“No, sir.” I headed into my room while he went to his own, and set my pack in a corner. I carefully removed each of my knives, cleaning the few that had been used recently, then stowing them in the case in my pack. I had a spare set of clothes in there as well – the same regulation grey as what I was wearing – but that set was also dirty, as I’d changed clothes midway through our jungle trek. I was grateful to have a clean set to wear, and I assumed that my master would let me know in the morning where and how I should do some laundry.
By the time I headed into the shower, my master was already finishing up, a pair of soft-looking pants on his legs and his head buried in a towel as he rubbed his hair. I set my things on a bench and headed into a stall, and by the time I emerged, he was gone.
Although he’d said he would collect me in the morning, I was anticipating finding him waiting in my room after my shower. Expecting us both to get clean first was pragmatic, but given his repeated praise of my work and his public claiming of me, the next event for the evening seemed entirely obvious. He would want to have sex with me. That was what I had been taught to expect, and I was actually a little surprised that it hadn’t happened already.
But then again, trekking through the jungle and camping with three other people around was perhaps not the most appropriate place for it. I knew that some masters were willing to share their dimari with other men, but since I hadn’t been trained as an erotic companion, it was more likely that my master would want to keep me to himself.
I was thrumming with anticipation as I gathered my dirty clothes and crossed the hall back to my bedroom. My master was a gorgeous man, and I’d spent plenty of time during our evenings in the jungle watching with surreptitious glances as he sat and stared at the fire. His intense focus was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen, and I could hardly wait to have his whole attention fixed on me. Would he take me fast or slow? Rough or gentle? On the bed? Or bent over the dresser? Or up against the wall?
I opened the door, having assumed that my master would have access to my room, since he owned me, and stepped into… an empty room.
I looked around stupidly, like he could have been hiding behind the non-existent wardrobe. I ducked my head back out into the hallway, wondering if perhaps he was waiting out there, if maybe he couldn’t unlock the door after all. But the hallway was also empty.
I turned back to my empty room, feeling a cold chill settle in my bones. Why wasn’t he here? Did he not want me? I had expected…
No, notexpected. I didn’t have the right toexpectanything from my master. Any kind of sexual pleasure or release was entirely at his discretion, and I wouldn’t dream of asking for orexpectingsuch a gift. But I hadanticipatedmy role in responding to his desires, in being available for his use of me. He’d been so emphatic about being pleased with me.
So why was my room empty?
Did he expect me to go into his room? But that was impossible. That would be tantamount to asking for sex, which was something an obedient dimari would never, ever do.
I need you to explain to me why you’re rejecting me,I wanted to say to him.I want to understand what I did wrong.
Humans did not understand the way dimari worked, I reminded myself. My master had said as much. But if he did not understand, and I could not explain, how were we ever going to make this work?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Aiden
“You want to enrol him in the military?” Henderson looked dubious as he regarded the form I’d sent him the following morning. We were back in his office, my mind simultaneously wired for action and completely exhausted. Which wasn’t a surprise, given that I’d been up until two o’clock in the morning, poring through every piece of information I could find on the dimari.
“Yes, sir. I spent a good part of last night reading about dimari psychology. There’s a surprisingly large amount of information on the grid, if you know where to look.” Admittedly, most of that information was in articles from extra-planetary journalists decrying dimari ownership, but reading between the lines, a lot of the articles had been surprisingly informative. “The way I see it is that Kade has spent a good portion of his life training to be a soldier, so that’s what he expects to be doing here. Not allowing him to do it would be like taking someone who’s completed an engineering degree and making them work in a coffee shop. He would be bored senseless, and I have a theory that that’s a good part of the reason why so many dimari get depressed. They’re bored and lacking in purpose.”
Henderson sighed. “But the difference,” he said, “is that Kade didn’t choose this. We would be putting him in life-threatening situations, and because he’s compelled to follow your orders, he would have no option to back out if he didn’t like it. People like you or I, on the other hand, signed up willingly, knowing exactly what we were getting into.”
“To be fair, there’s not a lot of evidence one way or the other whether I’m on the right track with this,” I said, knowing I couldn’t push the point too hard. “But if we only do what everyone else has done, then we know exactly what result we’re going to get. If we try something else, then at the very least, we might learn something along the way. And if I find more information that says we shouldn’t be doing this, or if he becomesnoticeably unhappy, then we change course and try something else.” I waited, knowing this was a huge gamble – not just because I didn’t know if Henderson was going to go for it, but because I currently had no way of checking with Kade whether or not he was on board with the idea. I’d figured out so far that there were certain things he’d been trained not to say or not to ask for, but finding workarounds to tease his true opinions out of him was going to take time. If it could be done at all.
“Kade’s willingness to enlist isn’t the only problem,” Henderson said. “There’s also the security issues. He was trained by a non-Alliance species, and his bonding to you aside, we have no guarantee of his loyalties. We don’t understand the neuro-engineering processes the Eumadians use. They could have implanted any sort of command into his head, to do literally anything, and we’d never know about it. He could be a closet assassin. Or a spy.”
I thought about that for a moment. “So put him through the normal security and psychology checks that every other recruit goes through. I’ll order him to answer the questions honestly. That doesn’t mean he’s going to come right out and say he’s a spy, if he is one, but if there’s any kind of resistance or prevarication to answering the questions, we’ll know we need to probe deeper.” Kade had already hesitated when I’d asked him to do things that conflicted with his training – like calling me Aiden, for example. A repeat of that behaviour would flag that there was an issue.
Henderson didn’t look convinced, but in the end, he nodded. “All right. I’ll interview him today. I should be able to fit him in sometime after lunch. But if he doesn’t pass with a clear green light, I’m not taking this any further.”
I nodded. “Fair enough. Just one thing I will ask, though? Don’t tell him – or even imply, in the slightest way – that I wasn’t his intended owner. From the reading I’ve done, it seems that knowing they’ve bonded to someone they weren’t supposed to sends them over the edge.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Henderson promised. Occasional black moods aside, he was a fair and reasonable man, and I was confident that he was as concerned about Kade’s long term mental health as I was. But at the same time, he had a responsibility to the rest of the base to ensure we weren’t putting anyone else in danger.
