Not quite a cell, but close enough.
Through the wall, the voice kept going. Male, middle-aged, professional. "Lot 34, opening at one hundred thousand. Do I hear one hundred? One hundred to the gentleman in the third row . . ."
Auctioneer. I was listening to an auctioneer practice.
My stomach lurched. I swallowed hard, tasted bile, forced it down. Checked my body for damage. My clothes were intact—jeans, t-shirt, the denim jacket I'd been wearing in the storage unit. Shoes still on. No obvious injuries beyond the persistent ache in my bad knee and the needle bruise I could feel when I touched my neck.
The Polaroid.
Panic flared hot and immediate. I patted my jacket pockets. Empty. My jeans. Empty. They'd taken my bag, taken the camera, taken the last thing I had from before. Something about losing the camera hit me harder than everything else. I felt its absence, the absence of my past, like I’d finally lost everything.
The metal door opened without warning. No knock. No courtesy.
A woman entered, fifty-something, grey pantsuit, tablet in one hand and a garment bag in the other. She looked like a corporate executive or a wedding planner. The kind of person who made checklists and followed them exactly.
"You're awake. Good." Her voice matched her appearance—professionally pleasant, like a flight attendant explaining emergency procedures while the plane went down. "We're on a schedule, Miss Andreeva."
"Where am I?" My voice came out rough, raw.
"Newark. The Settling auction house." She hung the garment bag on a hook by the door. "You're Lot 37."
The numbers clicked into place. The auctioneer practicing. The industrial setting. Lot 37.
"What is The Settling?"
"Neutral ground for the five families." She said it like I should know what that meant. "We facilitate transactions that would otherwise result in bloodshed. Items, information, services. Your father's debt was sold to us six days ago. We're liquidating the asset."
"I'm not an asset."
Her smile didn't reach her eyes. "Sadly, you are. Debt bondage. $2.3 million. Whoever buys you owns the debt and your service until it's paid off. Could be a year, could be ten. Depends on the buyer and what you're worth to them."
My photographic memory served up statistics without asking. Human trafficking in the United States: 400,000 people enslaved at any given time. Debt bondage: most common form of modern slavery. Average time in servitude: 7.2 years. Survival rate after ten years: 34%.
"This is slavery." I stood, testing my balance. The room stayed level. Good. "Illegal. Trafficking. You can't—"
"No, honey." She checked her tablet, scrolling through information about me. About my life reduced to data points and market value. "Slavery is illegal. This is business. Debt collection. Asset liquidation. All perfectly legal under the right contracts."
"Debt bondage is illegal in the United States."
"You're very smart." She looked up from the tablet. "Your file says dual enrollment at City College before you dropped out. Photographic memory. High IQ. That'll help your price. Smart girls are worth more than pretty ones, and you're both."
The compliment made my skin crawl.
"You can't sell people."
"We don't sell people. We sell debt contracts with service obligations. The person comes with the contract. Semantics matter in legal terms." She set the tablet on the cot. "You have thirty minutes to prepare. The dress is your size. Put it on. There's a bathroom through that door—clean yourself up. Someone will come get you at eight o'clock."
"What if I refuse?"
Her expression didn't change. "Then you go on stage exactly as you are, looking like you've been drugged and stuffed in a storage facility. The buyers won't care. Might even prefer it—shows you're a fighter. But it'll hurt your price, and a lower price means longer servitude. Your choice."
She moved toward the door.
"Wait." My brain was starting to work again, processing information, calculating odds. "Who buys at these auctions?"
"The five families. Occasionally outside parties if they have the connections and capital." She paused at the door. "But tomorrow night is family only. Volkovs, Besharovs, Kozlovs, Sokolovs, Morozovs. One of them will buy you. Probably the Besharovs—they have the capital and they like smart girls. You could do worse."
"I could do better by not being sold at all."
