Holy fucking hell. An entire species was deliberately manufacturing children for money? And then abandoning them to a life of servitude? I swallowed hard and gritted my teeth. If I ever met a Vangravian female, I would be sorely tempted to put a bullet in her skull.
The lawyer seemed equally as stunned. “So, in conclusion, Your Honour…” She grimaced, then cleared her throat. “In conclusion, it seems that the Eumadians are not just opportunistically taking advantage of unwanted children, but are deliberately manufacturing a demand for them, in order to buy them, train them, and then sell them. Kade, are there any other pertinent details to this situation?”
“Not that I’m aware of, ma’am,” he said.
“Volgoch, do you have anything to add to this topic?” the lawyer asked, looking like she wanted to punch the man if he dared to say a single word in his own defence.
Volgoch rose halfway out of his seat. “No, ma’am,” he said, before abruptly sitting down again.
The trial went on. A handful of witnesses were called up, and I was heartened to hear each of them stating how impressed they had been with Kade’s work, and defending the idea that he was capable of independent decision making. Henderson, Vosh, Nichols… even Kent gave a rousing endorsement of Kade’s abilities, despite his initial dislike of having a dimari around. We broke for a recess after two hours of debate, before picking up again right where we’d left off.
More witnesses, more vague justifications for the slave trade from the Eumadians, and then Kade was called up by the Eumadians’ lawyers to answer a few questions.
“No, I was never beaten as a child,” Kade told the court, in response to the lawyer’s latest question. “I have only been struck a total of three times in the whole of my training. Two of those were for putting a fellow dimari’s life at unnecessary risk, and the third was for refusing an attempt at sexual training.” My jaw clenched at that one. I had enough fury about whatever Kade had been forced to do already. I really didn’t want to hear more details about the Eumadians’ sick practices.
“What were they attempting to train you to do?” the lawyer asked.
“Sounding,” Kade replied, completely nonchalant. A couple of gasps drifted from the public gallery, earning a scowl from the judges.
“And did you comply with subsequent attempts to teach you this practice?” Was this fucking lawyer for real? How the hell was that an appropriate question for a courtroom?
“No, sir,” Kade said, as respectful as ever. “They stopped trying to teach me to do it.”
I pressed a hand over my mouth, fighting back the urge to laugh. In that one statement, Kade had inadvertently proven the point we were all so desperately trying to make. He’d objected to a particular requirement of his training, to the point that the trainers themselves had given up trying to get him to do it. If that wasn’t a solid defence of his own ability to express his desires and make decisions, I didn’t know what was.
“Overall, would you say your childhood was enjoyable?” the lawyer asked.
I smirked, wondering why he was deliberately digging such a deep hole for himself… until Kade’s answer pulled me up short. “Yes, it was,” he said, with that same unruffled calm. “The Eumadians primarily train us through positive reinforcement. Tasks were designed to be enjoyable. Greater difficulty meant greater rewards. As a whole, the dimari are highly motivated to please our trainers. We felt privileged to be undergoing the training, not oppressed.”
Well, fuck me sideways. That was something that, oddly enough, had never occurred to me. Humanity’s own history, blackened with so many instances of slavery, had always been about subjugation, not reward. Maybe that was why we had such a hard time understanding the dimari. They genuinely enjoyed their work, while we firmly expected them to hate it.
“How old were you the first time you were required to undergo neurological engineering?” the defence lawyer asked, several minutes later.
“I believe I was about seven,” Kade replied. “The Eumadians don’t generally keep accurate records of our ages. But I know my first experience with it was in the Eumadian year of eight hundred and ninety-four. Assuming that I’m currently twenty, that would have meant I was seven.”
“And what do you remember about the experience?”
For the first time since he’d begun being questioned, Kade’s mild politeness cracked. A look of sorrow crossed his face, like the memory of something he’d once known, but that was now lost. “I remember being very scared,” Kade said. “I didn’t understand what the machine did, but I’d seen some of my friends be put inside it. When they came out, they were… different. Different in a good way, I guess. They were more cheerful. More helpful. But they were…” He flinched. “It’s hard to describe. They played less. They didn’t want to think up new games anymore. It was like looking at a person reflected in a pond, instead of at the person themselves. They seemed just a little bit… hollow. I didn’t want to be like that.”
“And after you were put into the machine? How did you feel about it then?”
Kade shrugged. “I realised there was nothing to worry about. It didn’t make me less of a person. It just made everything clearer. My purpose. My training. It made me better. There was no reason to object to it.”
Oh fuck. I felt tears pricking at my eyes, and I blinked them away. I was not going to fucking cry in the middle of a court room. These fucking bastards were ripping the souls out ofchildren, for the sake of a fuckingprofit.
The case dragged on. Another recess. More questions. I felt like I was getting emotional whiplash, torn between grieving for the man Kade should have been, raging at the Eumadians, feeling a flood of gratitude every time the defence team pulled out a new argument as to why the Eumadians were assholes, and drowning in a deep, existential fear that I would never be a good enough master to make up for what had been taken from Kade.
In the middle of the afternoon, the defence finally asked the question of Volgoch that I’d been waiting for the entire day. “It is my understanding,” a Sedgeged lawyer said, having taken over from the Solof, “that once a dimari has bonded with a master, they cannot be bonded to anyone else. The bondis unbreakable. So how could it possibly benefit the Eumadians to reclaim a dimari who has already been bonded?”
“It’s an excellent question,” Volgoch said, in a voice that said he didn’t give a shit either way. “And until now, that has been true – the bond could not be broken. However, with the number of dimari we’ve been losing, we’ve been working on technological upgrades that can reverse the bonding and allow them to bond with a new master. And we believe we have now achieved that.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Kade
Alittle over twenty-four hours after Volgoch dropped that bombshell into the courtroom, I stood at parade rest at the side of a fancy restaurant on the south western edge of Hon. The Nwandu ambassador and her entourage, along with a number of Associates, were having dinner, with the restaurant situated on a wide estate, overlooking a beautiful vineyard. There were also a significant number of administration staff who had been invited, plus a handful of journalists. Earlier in the day, we’d been able to see the vines, heavy with grapes, ready to be harvested in the next few weeks, all lined up in neat rows that stretched out around us. Now, the sun was setting and the fields were fading from orange to grey, and would soon be covered in darkness.
Given the number of people here, both my master’s team and Commander Preswood’s team had been called up, and we were stationed at intervals around the room, interspersed with the Nwandu security team. I kept my eyes on the room, the guests, the waiters, the musicians at the far end… but my mind kept wandering back to the staggering news Volgoch had announced. The Eumadians had the technology to break my bond with my master. The idea was terrifying.
