Page 27 of Never Bound

“Nothing repeatable,” I said grimly. I’d almost forgotten the vile message I’d received from him this morning, with everything else going on. Of course it had made me momentarily ill to see such disgusting things written about me by someone I used to consider a friend. I’d blocked him immediately and decided not to tell my boy, even though he’d been mentioned in it, too.

As for Juliette, she might not know precisely what the problem was with Corey, but she probably had her suspicions. After all, she had just fallen into a pair of amber-gold eyes and barely made it out alive. “The last time I saw him, he was stumbling out of yet another bar on University with some sketchy characters I’d never seen before. Then he sent me a message today. Tomorrow is his party, by the way. I hope you don’t mind that I gave him your regrets.”

“Not at all.”

“Then I got his response.”

I felt as ill as Juliette looked. “I don’t want to read it, do I?”

“I wouldn’t. It was really disgusting, Lou. I’m not telling you this to cause drama. I just want to warn you.” She glanced quickly at him again. “Both of you.”

So it wasn’t just a suspicion then. Shit. This needed to be addressed. But so did a lot of things, and I wasn’t even sure where to start with most of them. In the end, I just thanked Juliette and told her we’d catch up soon. We both knew it was a lie.

“And to think I was planning to leave without even saying a proper goodbye to my old buddy Corey,” he said carefully after we left Juliette and bounded up the stairs of the mirror lab. “How insensitive of me. Poor guy sounds devastated.”

“Yeah, sounds like he’s really weeping into his beer,” I replied just as carefully as he pushed open the door.

“Can I help you?” interrupted the balding male volunteer behind the front desk. A question I had noted was rarely offered with any intention of helping.

In a second, I saw the problem.

His haste to gape in wonder at the ten-meter-long disc of rippling liquid mercury suspended on the wall was understandable. However, entering the building, he had inadvertently pushed up the sleeves of his jacket. I couldn’t blame him, since he must have been boiling after the rapid walk across campus in the blazing sun. But the worldcouldblame him, of course, and did.

“What are you doing?” I hissed. I pushed his arm down, which was totally pointless since it had already been seen, and the fact that I was so freely touching him would just get us in more trouble. Would the guy kick us out? Would he call the campus police? Would it get to myfather? Panic settled quickly in. I could see it on his face, too. Right now, it was looking like our best shot was to make a break for it. But then what about—

“I’ll deal with this, Teague,” broke in a woman with petite, delicate features, freckly ocher skin, and tousled hair dyed in cotton-candy streaks of aqua and electric blue.

Milagros—so her name tag said—continued to stare at Teague politely but pointedly until he disappeared into the back office as if he’d never been there. She waited to speak until he had closed the door. “I used to do that, too, when I got distracted,” she said, nodding toward his wrist. “My neighbor used to take me to campus with her, but she threatened to stop if I couldn’t learn to hide it better. But I just wanted to go to the planetarium to learn about black holes and quasars, and I didn’t care whether anyone knew I was a slave. To me, it was easiernotto hide it. She wanted me to be her equal, and I didn’t know how.”

Well,thatgot his attention away from the telescope.

Normally, the last thing a former slave would ever bring up in conversation wasbeinga former slave—that’s why I hadn’t met many of them, at least knowingly.Blend in and keep quietwas the name of their game. In fact, of all the things Milagros could have turned out to be, that hadn’t even been on the list. Maybe it had been on his, though.

“In the end, she had the right idea, though,” Milagros continued.

“Why?” he spoke freely now, his attention riveted.

“Because I’m now a graduate student in astronomy. And she’s now my wife.”

For the first time in over forty-eight hours, he and I met each other’s eyes in something other than white-hot rage.

“Your wife?” I asked.

Milagros nodded serenely. “Erica Muller.”

9

HIM

“Wehadfouryearstogether—in secret—before Erica’s family moved and I got sold,” Milagros explained during the four-block walk between the campus and Erica’s and her house. She’d said it was the safest place to discuss what we had come to discuss. “My owners only spoke Spanish at home, so not only was I illiterate, I couldn’t speak English, either. Erica taught me everything—I taught her Spanish, too—and they allowed it, as long as she didn’t take up too much of my time. When you’re both girls, nobody really worries that you might fall in love. They just thought she saw me as a charity case, you know?”

But, she explained, Erica’s father’s job transferred him back East and Milagros’ owners lost a fortune in the recent recession, and—despite Erica’s fruitless pleas to her own family to buy her—sold her off cheaply to a service that sent teams of slaves to do housekeeping for lower-income families who couldn’t afford their own.

“I probably don’t need to go into detail about what it was like,” she said, looking at me meaningfully.

No, she sure didn’t.

Erica, she explained, distraught at having had to let the love of her life go, fought back the only way she could—by joining the SLA, which at the time had been infiltrated by a faction that saw violence as the only way forward. But their plan to blow up every police car in the state failed, of course, and many of Erica’s old associates were tracked down, convicted, and made slaves themselves, sent to toil in mines, farms, and factories. Everyone else went underground. Erica and Milagros kept in touch—for five years—over the same communication network that Maeve and her brother had used.

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