Page 45 of Xel: Broken Bond
“I stole it from my mother,” Rohinavon admitted flippantly.
I huffed out a breath. “I take it she’s not going to be impressed when she finds out?”
“The money’s not an issue. She’d hardly notice it’s missing. It’smebeing missing that she’ll be furious about. She’s no doubt already furious. We had to shoot eight guards in order to get out of the port. It would have been all over the news in a matter of minutes. That’s why we needed the best stealth technology available in the whole galaxy – that’s mostly what I paid for,not just the voyage itself. Vangal sent out a fleet of fighters the instant they knew what we’d done. The only thing that was going to save us at that point was to simply disappear.”
“And then make a number of illegal jumps through other people’s wormholes,” Aiden filled in, which confirmed that my master had told him the rest of the story on the way here.
Rohinavon shrugged. “We did what we had to do.”
“I have a question,” my master said. “You said your son had to stay with you for six months before he could survive on his own. But you also said that male children are sold within a few days of being born. So how do they survive in the freighters? Or on Eumad?”
“In incubators,” Rohinavon and Kade answered at the same time.
Rohinavon looked surprised at his reply, but then the scales across her chest rippled with violet. “Oh. Yes, I suppose you would know about that, wouldn’t you,” she said, embarrassed.
“There are nursery rooms at the training centres,” Kade explained, not at all upset about it. “The Eumadians are very open about where the younger children come from. Most dimari begin asking questions about it around the time they’re ten years old. By that point, though, they’ve already started the neuro-engineering process, so we’re too docile to be upset about it.”
Rohinavon grimaced. “That’s… horrible,” she muttered.
“The entire slave trade is horrible,” Aiden agreed. “But that’s a big part of why you’re here, isn’t it?” Rohinavon didn’t reply, but the answer was obvious. “So in an ideal world,” Aiden went on, “what happens next? Obviously, you want somewhere safe for your son to grow up, but what about you? Do you actually want to raise him? Or were you just making a political statement?”
Rohinavon laughed, a cold, bitter sound as she shook her head. “Justa political statement? You really have no idea, do you?”
“So enlighten me,” Aiden prompted her. “What am I missing?”
“My mother is on the Vangravian High Council. The positions are appointed by ballot, but they’re assigned for life. Her mother was on the Council before her, and her mother before that. I was being groomed to be the next generation of hoity-toity dictators, looking down our noses at the rest of the population and insisting that we knew what was best for them, no matter how many times the issue came up that notallwomen wanted to abandon their sons to the slave trade. I’m not the first one to have tried to leave. I’m just…” She stopped, fixing her eyes on the tabletop while she took a few deep breaths to steady herself. When she spoke again, her voice was tight. “I’m just the first one to have succeeded. And a large amount of that success is due to the fact that I had a literally bottomless pot of money at my fingertips; generations of wealth amassed for no purpose other than proving to the rest of the population how important we were.”
A heavy silence filled the room. “What do they do with the women who don’t manage to escape?” my master asked.
Rohinavon’s fists clenched in her lap, and rapid waves of colour rippled across her shoulders. “They’re publicly tortured until their bodies give out and they eventually die. That usually takes somewhere between two and four months.”
My master murmured a faint curse. “And you were willing to risk that in order to leave?”
Rohinavon was shaking now, and I suspected that the scale of what she’d done was belatedly catching up with her. “That’s why I paid so much money for a good ship,” she muttered.
“But youchoseto have a boy,” Aiden pointed out. “You’ve already said that you didn’t have to, not for the money. So why not just have a girl and avoid the whole problem?”
“I didn’t want to give myself the opportunity to back out,” she admitted. “I needed something that was going to force me to commit.” I wasn’t sure I understood the twisted logic in that one. She wasn’t brave enough to leave for her own sake, but she was brave enough to deliberately manufacture a child whose existence would force her to leave? Perhaps my confusion was because I didn’t understand enough about the Vangravian political system. It all seemed terribly convoluted.
“Why was it so important that you leave in the first place? From the sounds of it, you lived in a gilded cage – yes, it’s still a cage, but likely a very comfortable one.”
Rohinavon’s expression turned instantly from fearful to defiant. “How about you tell me what’s going to happen to my son,” she demanded, “and then I’ll tell you my master plan.”
Aiden shrugged, and I was once again impressed by his patience. “Like I said before, the first question is whether you want to raise him yourself.”
Rohinavon sighed. “If I can, then yes. At the very least, I want him to have a loving and stable family to raise him. But if I can do it myself, that would be preferable.” She stopped again, once more changing the subject. “If we take this to your Parliament, what are they going to say? Because publicly supporting a refugee from Vangal is effectively a declaration of war. And I highly doubt that the Alliance is going to risk hundreds of thousands of their own lives to protect one child.”
“You keep skirting the issue,” Aiden said, not letting her believe for one moment that she was going to manipulate her way out of this. “The Alliance as a whole is very much against slavery, and while we’re certainly not going to go and start a war deliberately, it’s entirely possible that the Parliament woulddecide to take this opportunity to make our feelings known. We’ve already made a few pointed statements to the Eumadians. And if you’re worried about your safety, then know that we have a number of treaties with some very powerful species. The Culrads joined our Alliance a bit over a year ago, and their technology is moving us ahead in leaps and bounds, and a little under a year ago, we signed a peace treaty with the Ranzors.”
Rohinavon’s jaw dropped. “The Ranzors? Are you insane?”
I couldn’t help but grin at her reaction. I’d heard the news from the other staff at the hotel, and many of them had had similar reactions. The Ranzors were a highly aggressive species with some of the most advanced technology in the entire known galaxy, and most species preferred to give them a wide berth. The fact that the Alliance had managed to successfully negotiate with them was nothing short of a miracle.
“Why would the Ranzors give a shit about Vangal?” she demanded of Aiden.
“Because, surprisingly enough, they’re almost as against slavery as the Alliance is. They have some very strong beliefs about each species, and each individual, having the right to self-determination. I think they’d actually be quite delighted to have a reason to pick a fight with the Vangravians.”
Rohinavon stopped to think about that. “So… you think that the Alliance Parliament might actually be willing to protect us? You think it’s worth asking?”