I cried out, and tried to twist further, but Lieutenant Withers, who had eased the pressure for a moment as if he had meant only to warn me of what he could do with his viselike grip if he chose, squeezed again, harder, at this new sign of resistance.
The pain from his strong hand felt nearly unbearable, and the young officer held me that way for a second longer than he had before. I, looking wildly about to see only Major Harrow standing by the couch, apparently waiting, first—out of sheer instinct—tried to wrest my arm from the hand imparting so much pain. I screamed, wondering idiotically, even as the white-hot agony shot up my arm, if I would wake the neighbors, who I knew liked to sleep late on the weekends.
Then, just as suddenly, I felt my body give in, at precisely the moment the pain from Lieutenant Withers’ fingers eased. I had the sense, somehow reassuring and disturbing in equal measure, that he had timed his torture to have exactly that effect: that he knew so much about how to control young women like me—complicatedyoung women, came the echo of the major’s voice in my mind—that he could predict exactly how much force to use with me.
He drew me further toward the couch and Major Harrow. He spoke in my ear, in a tone that seemed imbued with the same condescension the major’s patronizing smile had shown me.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be, Sara,” he said.
Oh, no. To hear that tone from a man clearly younger than I, as he had his strong hand on me, controlling me.Fuck you, I forced my mind to say—if only to myself—in defiance.Fuck you, you Magisterian fuckers.Fuck you and your ‘complicated.’
A sob broke from my throat as I forced my body to try one final time to pull myself away from the lieutenant, who stood so close to me that I could smell his cologne. That pleasant, masculine scent didn’t help at all—but the fragrance had nowhere near the effect of the renewed grip of his fingers on my elbow. He didn’t even squeeze as hard as he had the first time; all the lieutenant had to do was remind me of how much pain he could bring, and I let him move me the final step toward where his dark-bearded superior officer stood waiting next to my expensive couch.
“Now, Sara,” said Major Harrow. “Are you going to lay yourself down like a good girl and take what you’ve got coming?”
CHAPTER3
Sara
It took every bit of my will to pretend I didn’t have any idea what the major meant.
What you’ve got coming.
No Artemisian parent had used those words with a child since the colony’s founding, I felt sure—nor any teacher. Nor of course any spouse with their partner, because Artemisia’s charter explicitly outlawed marriage. Egalitarian culture, on my world, meant egalitarian culture. Disagreements between a parent and a child in their rearing group got resolved through loving application of boundaries. Later on, in school, a teacher might impose a consequence for misbehavior, but the very structure of the phrasewhat you’ve got comingrelied on an utterly atavistic understanding of power relationships.
As a rising public relations professional, I had had to study the way other cultures handled imbalances of power among groups and between individuals. I had studied Magisteria and its close allies, where ‘traditional’ gender norms prevailed, as little as possible. The very idea of men treating women in that patriarchal way simply because they came into the universe in possession of a mutant chromosome disgusted me.
I felt my forehead crease into a deep frown as I looked at the blue-upholstered arm of the couch and a picture, an all-too-clear mental image, of the posture Major Harrow wanted me to assume came into my mind’s eye. Again I heard in my head his words about what the Magisterian special police had learned about me from my infonet history.
I know how complicated a thing it is for you to undress in front of us.
If I could have rewound the scene to the point where the major had simply asked me to take off my clothes, I would have paid anything for the privilege, I told myself. In that case, I could have stripped off my sweats and my panties, sneering at them all the while, and… and… followed them to their transport and their reformation center, content to revel in the mark of paradoxical honor they had bestowed on me, a defiant Artemisian woman. I would have cast my stupid, pointless modesty aside and held my head high.
This, though… the lieutenant’s hand on my elbow, the scent of his cologne, the major’s beard, their crisp uniforms, their patronizing smiles… and the arm of the couch…
A sob rose to my lips, and my mouth spoke without my mind’s consent.
“Please,” I said, and I looked the major in the eye despite how it made my tummy flip over. “Please, don’t… I…”
I read in his eyes that he knew precisely how complicated a situation he had put me in. I also saw that he had not the slightest intention of taking pity on me—much worse, that Major Harrow, without a hint of real sadism, enjoyed this part of his job, and felt no shame about the pleasure he took in teaching women like me the lessons he believed they deserved.
Shameful consequences. A girl’s painful, bare-bottom reward for disobedience.
“Lieutenant,” the major said, his voice sounding absurdly gentle. His eyes flicked to the man on the other side of me, and the lieutenant lost no time in complying with the order he clearly understood from the simple inflection of his superior’s voice. I cried out as he used his grip on my elbow to bend me over the arm of the couch, my cheek pressing into the cushion.
“Hold her,” the major said.
“Oh, no,” I sobbed into the scratchy fabric. I tried to get up, starting to struggle in earnest out of sheer panic and million-year-old evolutionary biology.
The lieutenant complied with Major Harrow’s command with a pressure on my back that felt so precise I thought he must have trained for this particular duty in some special Magisterian academy for the fostering of masculine dominance. It felt like his strong hands, one on my neck and the other on the small of my back, even had a message in them:Stay there, girl. Don’t make me push harder.
With a cry of shame just at the idea of succumbing without protest, I defied the message. I writhed under the pressure of Lieutenant Withers’ hands even as I felt the major’s fingers reaching into the waistband of my sweatpants. That sensation, as dispassionate as it seemed to me despite the humiliating intimacy of the act, imparted a desperation to my struggle that did nothing but exhaust my strength sooner.
I managed to flail out with my left arm though, and strike the uniformed leg of the lieutenant. For that minuscule victory I received the reward of a tsking noise from the mouth of the younger man, and the movement of his right hand to grab my wrist and twist it behind my back.
My whole body shuddered. For the next few seconds, my mind absolutely refused to believe it: I felt like I had exited my body and begun to watch some absurd voyeuristic video of the kind I knew Artemisian men watched while pleasuring themselves from time to time. I had managed never to learn very much about the practice, but I knew the ancient name of that sort of video wasporn, and that they had once been made with real actors and actresses.
The vast majority of Artemisian society looked down on the watching of such videos. They existed on my world nevertheless because men could import them legally from other planets—worlds such as those in the Magisterian Federation—as long as they depicted digitally generated characters rather than showing actual people performing the sexual acts.