hear no evil, see no evil

Reuben stood in the hallway with his hands at his sides and looked at Theo with an expression that Theo was beginning to associate specifically with Reuben, this flat sort of expression that somehow looked both like indifference and seething resentment.

"This way," Reuben said, and started walking before Theo responded. He followed him through the house. It was bigger inside than it looked, or maybe it just felt bigger because everything was so carefully arranged. The floors were wood, dark and polished with a long ornate rug trailing down the hallway. The ceilings were high. As they moved further from the entryway, the pieces got more personal, still skilled, but less like something you'd see in a museum, sketches with smudged pencil marks, face studies and practice pieces for bigger things, it seemed. But Theo couldn't get a good look at any of them. Reuben walked fast.

Reuben led him up a staircase and down a hall and stopped at a door.

"This is yours," he said. He opened it but didn't go in, standing to the side like a hotel employee. The room was small but not cramped. There was a bed with actual sheets, a desk, a window with curtains, a closet. The bed was made. The quilt on top looked well done and handmade.

Theo stepped inside and turned around slowly, looking at everything. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a room a person with a life might inhabit. Theo had not had such luxury in two years.

"Bathroom's across the hall," Reuben said. "Towels are in the cabinet. Dinner's usually at seven but it'll be late tonight."

"Because of me."

"Because Arthur went to the auction instead of letting me start cooking on time." He wasn't saying it to be kind. It wasn't even acknowledgment. It seemed like he was just correcting the record, as if it was important. "I'm going to start dinner. You have maybe twenty minutes before he comes for you."

Reuben said it in the same flat tone he said everything else, but the content of it, the before he comes for you, made Theo's skin crawl. Theo opened his mouth and Reuben was already turning away.

"Reuben."

He stopped. Didn't turn around.

"What's going to happen?"

Reuben was quiet for a moment. Then, to the hallway: "He just wants to get to know you, the first day. It's not..." He stopped, considered, then started again. "It's not the worst thing he does. It's just the first thing."

And then he was gone and Theo was still there in the room that was now his and he looked at the bed with its sheets and the desk with its drawer and the window with its curtains and counted his heartbeats and waited.

Arthur came for him in fourteen minutes. He appeared in the doorway with his sleeves rolled to his elbows and that warm, focused expression on his face, the one from the auction, the one that made Theo feel like he was being read.

"Theo. Come with me, please. I want to show you the studio." His voice was bright as ever.

The studio was on the east side of the house, through a set of double doors that Arthur opened with both hands, producing a kind of ceremony and flourish, the way you'd open a church. The room was large and full of light, tall windows, angled lamps, canvases stacked against every wall. It smelled strongly of oil paint and whatever else you'd use for like. Painting, Theo guessed, paint thinners and other chemical smells mixing with the more earthy scents of canvas and paper and other materials in the back, clay and ink and something sweeter underneath, something organic. There was an easel set up in the center with a blank canvas. There was a stool. There was a long padded bench. And on the table beside the easel, arranged with the same care as surgical instruments on a tray, there was a set of blades.

Theo saw the blades and his body went cold.

"Have a seat." Arthur gestured to the stool. "Wherever's comfortable."

Theo stood frozen until Arthur placed his hands on his shoulders, using the slightest pressure to push him forwards and downwards until he was sitting in the chair. His eyes kept going to the table and he kept pulling them away and they kept going back. The blades were clean and varied in size, an exacto, a scalpel, something thinner, and beside them were the things Theo had expected to see in the studio: jars and tubes of oil paint, a palette, a set of brushes, and several small squares of thick paper, the kind used for color swatches.

Arthur pulled a stool up across from Theo and sat on it, their knees almost touching. He was close enough that Theo could smell his soap.

"So," Arthur said. "There's something I do with everyone who comes into the household. It's part of my process, and also a sort of—well. Welcome, I suppose? I think of it as a, ah, a baseline. An initial study."

He reached over to the table and picked up the medium exacto and held it loosely, comfortably, the way you'd hold a pen.

"I need to match your colors," Arthur said. "Skin and blood. Everyone's different. Different undertones, different saturations. Reuben's blood is very dark, almost brown-red. Beautiful, actually. Max's is brighter. More arterial, even from a surface cut. I need to know yours before I can paint you properly."

Theo stared at him. The words were so strange, so far outside anything the facility had prepared him for, that for a moment his brain just refused to process them. He had spent the last year in the facility, but it mostly prepared him for, like, standardized labor, for taking orders and for facing punishment, if he was disobedient. The facility had not prepared him for a man explaining, in a warm and patient voice, that he needed to cut him open to see what color he bled. For his art.

"You're going to cut me," Theo said. "To match paint."

"I'm going to take a small color study. Yes." Arthur said it gently. The way you'd explain a procedure to a child. "Arm, please. Left, I think. Roll your sleeve up."

Theo did not roll up his sleeve. He sat on the stool with his hands in his lap and looked at the blade in Arthur's hand and did not move.

"No," Theo said. His voice cracked on the word. "I—what? No. I'm not going to let you—"

"Reuben," Arthur said, not raising his voice.

There was a sound from the doorway. Theo looked up to see Reuben already moving, already crossing the studio with the unhurried efficiency of a man performing a task he had performed before. Behind him, further back, half-hidden and watchful, was someone Theo hadn't met yet. Small, with a shock of white-blonde hair that fell, scraggly, past his ears and covered some of his sharp-features. That must have been the other one Arthur mentioned in the car, Max. He was standing very still and his eyes were moving between Arthur and Theo with a quick, desperate attention, like he was tracking a ball in play.

Reuben went behind him and grabbed Theo by the left arm.

Reuben's hand closed around his forearm just above the wrist, and his other hand began pressing down on Theo's shoulder, the grip firm and steady and completely impersonal, not dissimilar to the way Theo had been restrained before, by faceless orderlies or handcuffs. He knew how much force was required to keep a person still and was applying precisely that amount and not an ounce more. Theo tried to pull free and his arm moved about half an inch in Reuben's hand and then stopped. He was very strong.

"I always invite the whole household for this, don't be embarrassed," Arthur said, glancing at the doorway where Max still stood. "It's a household moment."

"Let go of me," Theo said, giving up on Arthur and beginning to speak to Reuben. Reuben did not acknowledge that he'd spoken, his hand did not move. His face, from what Theo could see of it, did not move. He was flat and enduring and mildly inconvenienced as Theo began to thrash uselessly against Reuben. His arm stayed so stubbornly still and available for Arthur to get at.

He reached over and rolled Theo's sleeve up himself, folding the fabric neatly above the elbow. His hands were gentle, much lighter than Reuben's iron grip. He turned Theo's arm so the inner forearm faced up, the softer skin of the underside where the veins showed faintly through, and he studied it for a moment with his head tilted, the same way he'd studied faces at the auction, like he was looking for a certain way to see the thing in front of him. His thumb pressed into the skin and he watched the color change under pressure, watched it return.

"Good," he murmured. "Warm undertone. Darker than Max and Reuben, more yellow. I thought so."

He picked up the exacto and Theo's body did what it was always going to do, the thing the facility had spent eighteen months failing to train out of him. He fought. Not strategically, not well, not how he had ever hoped he would in the thousand violent fantasies he had dreamed in the past eighteen months. He jerked hard against Reuben's grip and his shoulder wrenched and his legs kicked against the stool legs and the stool scraped across the floor with a sound that seemed very loud in the studio and Reuben still held him.

It reminded Theo, obscenely, of a time when he and his brother were younger and had been tasked with building a fence around the backyard of their home. Reuben held him the way he'd held a fence post while Will hammered it into the ground, absorbing the force without moving, his hands adjusting their grip slightly to account for the angle of Theo's struggle but otherwise unchanging. Theo heard himself making sounds, ragged, panicked sounds that he couldn't control and didn't try to, and somewhere in the middle of it Arthur's free hand came up and touched his face.

"Oh, now you're just making it worse for yourself." Arthur said softly. His eyes were bright. He looked the way he'd looked at the auction when Theo had flinched, that expression of wonder, of startled delight. "That's okay. What I wanted, actually."

He made the first cut.

It was not deep. Theo knew this because he had medical training and the part of his brain that still functioned that way catalogued the wound automatically: superficial, three centimeters, dermis only, would close on its own within the week. The rest of his brain, the much larger and louder part, was screaming, and the rest of his body was also screaming, or at least trying to, a sound coming out of his throat that was high and raw and ugly and nothing like the controlled silence that he was supposed to have mastered. He never really did.

Arthur didn't react to the sound, or the thrashing, or anything else. Arthur was staring and yet completely ignoring Theo, already reaching for the palette, already picking up a brush, already mixing. He dipped the brush near the cut, making Theo's entire body jerk again, and picked up a bead of blood and brought it to the palette and began working it into the pigment.

"Hold him still," he said to Reuben. "I need it fresh."

Reuben's grip tightened, not by much, but enough to prevent any further jerking. Reuben's hands were freezing. Theo could feel the cold of them through his own skin, through the heat of the cut, and he thought stupidly, distantly: his hands were cold in the car too.

Arthur continued mixing, holding the swatch next to the cut and frowning.

"Too cool," he muttered to himself. He set down the swatch and picked up a different pigment, a warmer red, and mixed again and held it up to Theo and then to the light. The frown deepened.

"The oxidation changes it," he said, sounding annoyed. "It's already shifting. I need another sample."

He cut Theo again, half an inch below the first one. It was exactly the same, a quick controlled slash, the same depth, same length, a parallel line right underneath the first. Theo jerked in Reuben's grip again but this time it has no effect on Arthur. Reuben held him and Arthur held his arm and neither of them looked at his face. Arthur's attention was on the blood, not on Theo. Reuben's attention seemed to be on holding Theo down, but only the mechanics of keeping a body still, the same way a nurse's attention during a blood draw was on the vein and not the person.

"Better," Arthur said. He mixed quickly this time, working the fresh blood into the pigment before it could oxidize, and then he held the swatch up again. "Reuben, look at this. Am I wrong, or is there more ochre in his blood than yours?"

Reuben looked at the swatch and at the cut and at Theo's face for approximately half a second before looking back at the swatch.

"Looks right," Reuben said. He sounded like he wanted to be in the kitchen.

"Always so helpful." Arthur set down that swatch and picked up a clean one. "Now I need the skin. Forearm skin is different from the face, different from the torso, and I will do those eventually, but for today this is the baseline."

He pressed the clean swatch directly against Theo's uncut skin, comparing it to the paint he was mixing on the palette, going through his adjusting and looking and adjusting and looking routine over and over again.

"You're shaking," Arthur noted. "It's making the color read differently. Try to relax, please."

The sound that came out of Theo's mouth might have been a laugh. He wasn't sure. It was very very funny. He was pinned to a stool by a man he'd met an three hours ago while another man he'd met also three hours ago cut his arm open to compare his blood to oil paint and he was being told to try to relax. It might have been the funniest thing that had ever happened to him.

The third cut happened because the blood from the first two had mixed on his skin and Arthur wanted a clean sample from undamaged tissue. Theo had stopped fighting by now because Reuben's hands were immovable and Theo's body had started doing the math on its own, the twisted calculation of how much energy it cost to struggle versus how much it changed the outcome, which was nothing, which was zero, and his body was tired and his arm hurt and the man was going to cut him regardless and the only variable was whether Theo spent the energy or saved it. His mind did not want to save it, wanted to continue screaming and fighting, but his body chose to save it. This felt like the worst thing that had happened today and probably seven worse things had happened today.

He made another pathetic sound that made him cringe more at himself than the the third cut Arthur put into his skin. It was closer to a word, something between stop and please, and Arthur paused, not because of the sound but because he was checking the blade angle.

"I'm almost done," Arthur said. "Your blood is being difficult. It's got this almost amber quality in the first few seconds. See this?" He held up a swatch to show Theo his own blood mixed into paint and Theo looked at it because the way Reuben was holding gave him nowhere else to look. The swatch was red and brown and warm and it meant nothing, it was not him, it was nothing, it was paint.

"I see it," Theo said. His voice was very quiet. He did not.

"Good. You do see it, don't you? Reuben never sees it. Max?"

Max stepped forward from the doorway. "I see it," he said. He had been paying close attention, it seemed. "It's warmer than mine."

"It is warmer than yours, significantly, actually. His whole palette is warm, his skin, his blood, even the undertone of these bruises." Arthur touched the edge of a bruise on Theo's wrist, a fading yellow-green mark from the restraints. "I'm going to want to paint that before it heals. Someone remind me later."

"I will," Max said.

The fourth cut was because the third had already started to clot and Arthur wanted to compare the fresh color against the first swatch, which had dried. The fifth was because he'd moved to a different part of the forearm, closer to the wrist, where the skin was thinner and the blood showed differently against it. By the fourth cut, Theo had stopped making sounds. He could still feel every cut. He could still feel Reuben's cold hands and the stool under him and the sting of each new line. He just couldn't do anything about any of it anymore, and his body, having accepted this, had stopped trying and gone quiet.

Arthur made two more cuts. Theo counted them because Arthur had stopped counting, if he'd ever started. Seven. The number was seven.

"I think that's good for today," Arthur said, finally, setting down the brush. He looked at his row of swatches. There were seven of them, lined up on the table, each one a slightly different shade of Theo. "I'll let these dry and compare them tomorrow in natural light. The tungsten light skews warm."

He stood up and stretched and looked at Theo's arm with that same pleasant and satisfied expression Theo was beginning to notice he held a lot. It was starting to become one of Theo's least favorite expressions.

"Reuben, can you clean him up? Nothing too heavy. I'm going to want to see how the cuts sit tomorrow."

Reuben let go of his arm. The absence of the grip was almost worse than the grip itself, the sudden return of his own body to his own control, freedom arriving now that it was fucking useless. Theo's arm stayed where it was, extended, like it was waiting for someone to take it again. He had to tell it to move. It took a moment for it to listen.

"Dinner in thirty minutes?" Arthur asked.

"If that," Reuben said.

Arthur left the studio. Max followed him, close on his heels, quick and quiet. Theo sat on the stool and counted the cuts on his forearm while Reuben cleaned them without speaking. His hands were efficient and practiced and he did not meet Theo's eyes. The gauze went on loosely, just like Arthur told him to, light enough to see through.

"Dinner," Reuben said when he'd finished. "Kitchen's downstairs, end of the hall."

"Not going to be able to eat. Obviously." Theo spat at him, his eyes trained on the stupid light bandages. The seven cuts already bleeding through, visible just like Arthur wanted. His voice sounded strange to him. Far away.

Reuben looked at him for a moment. Something moved behind his face, the same flash Theo had seen at the auction, fast and controlled and immediately gone.

"He doesn't care that much if you don't eat." Reuben said slowly. "You still have to show up. Everyone always comes to dinner. Thirty minutes."

Then he turned and left, and Theo was alone.

The handler unclipped the lead but left the restraints, leaving Theo to just stand there, wrists bound, trying to breathe evenly, trying to do the thing that someone at facility had told him to do once, be calm, be still, this is the transition, this is something. It was something. He couldn't remember what else the person told him to do. His heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his teeth.

Arthur finished signing and turned, looking at Theo and smiling warmly. The smile reached his eyes. "Ready to go?"

Theo didn't know what to say to that. It wasn't as if it mattered if he wasn't. He nodded.

"Good. Reuben, can you—?" Arthur waved his hand vaguely at Theo, at his arm, specifically, and Reuben stepped forward and took hold of it just above the elbow. He had a firm grip, like he had done this before and knew it was likely for Theo to bolt at any moment. His hands were freezing. There was the slightest tremor in Reuben's fingers, so slight Theo might have imagined it, except he had trained his hands to feel for tremors.

"I'm not going to run," Theo said. He was speaking in a whisper. He didn't mean to. He cleared his throat, like that had been the problem.

Reuben didn't look at him. "Great," he said, though from the tone, Theo read: I don't care what you think you're going to do.

Arthur led the way towards the exit, with Reuben steering Theo a half-step behind, and Theo couldn't help but notice then way the other buyers glanced at them, the way a few nodded at Arthur. One woman said, "Arthur, good to see you," and Arthur said, "Always, Margot," without breaking stride. He seemed popular, here. Just like everything else today, Theo did not care to think too deeply about what that could mean.

Outside, the air was cool and the sky was a color Theo didn't recognize, something in between blue and gray that might have been specific to this planet's atmosphere. Or maybe it was just that he'd been indoors for so long, between the facility, the transport, the auction house, he couldn't remember the last time he was outside for longer than a few minutes in between destinations, it had been long enough that the open air felt strange on his skin, like there was too much space, too many directions to look. He'd need to shake that, soon, if he could. He couldn't be afraid of the fucking sky. So, he swallowed and looked anyway. As soon as his eyes adjusted to the light, they began noticing all the places he could run to if Reuben hadn't been still gripping onto his arm. There was a a street to the left, a parking structure to the right, a low wall across the road he could clear if he had to. His legs were calculating distances before his conscious mind caught up and reminded him: handcuffs, Reuben, nowhere to go even if you got away. He didn't even know what planet he was on, they had said it wouldn't matter, that he could go anywhere in the universe, if that was what his eventual owner wanted.

Anywhere in the universe.

Arthur glanced back at him. and something like amusement crossed his expression.

"I like that," Arthur said. "You're already looking."

Theo's stomach dropped.

"You're still not being subtle. I can see your eyes moving, looking for all the ways you could get away." Arthur said this with warmth, like he was coaching a student. "It won't help, but I like that you do it."

There was a car waiting for them at the curb. Arthur opened the door for him and gestured Theo inside. Reuben released his arm and Theo climbed in awkwardly, focusing hard on balancing despite the restraints making it difficult. He was not going to fall, not right now, not into the interior with its soft leather and tinted windows. Theo sat where it seemed like he was supposed to sit and tried to take up as little space as possible, squeezing his legs and arms as close to himself as he could. Arthur slid in across from him. Reuben got in last, sitting on the same side as Theo but as far from him as the seat allowed, pressing himself against the opposite window, as far from Theo as he could get while still being in the same vehicle.

The transport pulled away from the curb. Theo watched the auction house shrink through the tinted window and tried to wrestle with the strange feeling in his chest. The auction house and the facility before it had been awful. Awful awful awful in the way that sometimes made Theo wake up in the middle of the night frozen, in complete disbelief that his life for eighteen months had been white walls and the smell of antiseptic and orderlies and trainers, the people who forced and taught him to take orders and look down and take his hits well when he needed to. The relief he felt at the idea of never seeing it again was going head-to-head against the fear of what the man in front of him could possibly be. He wasn't sure which feeling was winning.

"So," Arthur said, settling into his seat. "I imagine you have questions."

Theo looked at him and looked away to his own hands bound in his lap. He could not speak. He did not remember how to, in this moment.

"It's okay," Arthur said. His voice was soft. "This is a lot, I know. Take your time. It must feel like it's all happening very quickly—"

Reuben made a sound, something between a sigh and a scoff, barely audible, directed more at the window he was staring out of than either of the two men beside him. Arthur still noticed. His eyes flicked to Reuben. "Something to share?"

"No."

"Because it sounded like you had something to share."

Reuben was quiet for a moment. Then, without taking his eyes off of the window: "I thought you said you were going to be more discerning this time."

For a second Theo wondered if he had read the situation wrong, before and Reuben wasn't owned but something else entirely. There was small tension in the car, like this was an argument, an argument being resumed rather than started. Arthur's expression didn't change, but something behind it shifted.

"I was discerning," Arthur said. His voice sounded very mild and patient.

"You made up your mind in thirty seconds. You didn't ask those handlers anything, you didn't read his file. You saw him looking to run. He wanted to, I could feel it in my hands. And you don't even—" Reuben stopped. His jaw worked. When he spoke again, his voice was flatter. "The last three were impulsive too. And I'm the one who had to—"

"Reuben."

He said his name gently but Reuben responded as if he had been slapped, or, more accurately, like a hand placed over a mouth, ending the conversation entirely. Reuben closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them he was looking out the window again and his face had had gone dark, like a machine powering down.

Theo sat very still while his brain worked hard to process the words "the last three." Three people before him who had been bought and brought to wherever they were going and then — what? Reuben had to what? The sentence had been cut off before the verb, and the verb seemed necessary, very necessary for his full understanding of what was to come. Part of him wanted to ask, if he could remember how to speak. He was still working on that.

"I'm sorry about that," Arthur said, turning back to Theo with the warmth returned to his face like it had never left. "Reuben worries. It's one of his better qualities, actually, when he's being more reasonable." He smiled at Reuben — a genuine, fond smile that Reuben did not return or acknowledge. "He's very protective of the house. You'll understand once you've settled in."

Theo nodded because nodding seemed safe.

"Do you want to know something embarrassing? I just realized I never asked your name. Your real name, I mean. I know the file has a designation, but I don't use those."

Reuben hit his head softly and on purpose against the glass. Arthur noticed but seemed to ignore it, this time.

"Theo," Theo answered him. Then, because the silence seemed to warrant more: "Theo McCarthy."

"Theo." Arthur said it like he was tasting it. "I like that. Theo McCarthy. McCarthy."

"That's, um. That was my family's name. Yes."

"Was." Arthur's expression softened into genuine sympathy, or something that looked exactly like it. It made Theo want to kick him. "I'm sorry. The stories I read about were brutal. Unconscionable, really. I hope the things you saw don't haunt you too badly."

What the fuck. Theo felt his throat tighten. He didn't want this man to talk about the conquest. He didn't want this man to say barbaric with feeling in his voice while Theo sat across from him in handcuffs.

"How long were you at the facility?" Arthur asked.

"Eighteen months."

Arthur's eyebrows rose. "Eighteen months? That's...God, that's a long time. I didn't—" He looked genuinely disturbed. "We messed up some paperwork a few years ago, Reuben had to go for a matter of weeks and it was terrible. Wasn't it?"

Reuben said nothing. A muscle in his jaw moved.

"Those places are. Well. I don't want to say cruel, because that implies intention, and I think it's worse than that. It's bureaucratic, it's assembly-line, metrics and benchmarks and paperwork. I hate it." Arthur shook his head. "I'm sorry you went through that, Theo. I really am."

Theo stared at him. What the fuck.

He went through everything Arthur did in the past hour in his head, the way he grabbed a boy's throat to watch his pulse jump, kneaded another's face like clay, the way he had grabbed Theo's jaw and held it when he flinched, the way he was still wearing the goddamn handcuffs and the way the car doors were almost certainly locked. All of those things had happened. Now, it was happening that he sitting across from Theo with soft eyes and a gentle voice saying I'm sorry you went through that like he meant it. It really sounded like he meant it.

"Thank you," Theo said, because what else could he say.

"You're safe now," Arthur said. "I know you probably don't believe that, yet. But my household is, well, it's completely different from what you've experienced. You'll see."

The car moved through streets Theo didn't recognize, past buildings he'd never seen, on a planet he'd spent the last eighteen months on and never seen. Everything outside the tinted windows was alien. He watched it pass and felt the distance between himself and everything he'd known stretching like a wire about to snap. He was never going home again. That had been true for the past eighteen months, longer.

"The grounds are quite extensive," Arthur was saying. He sounded like he was playing at tour-guide, friendly and informational. "It's about two hundred acres, most of it wooded. There's a perimeter system, of course, but it's nothing aggressive, it's all sensor-based, just knows when someone crosses a boundary line. And the house itself is old, my grandfather built the original wing, but I've done significant renovations. My studio takes up most of the east side."

He was describing a fortress. His home was a fortress. Theo felt himself sinking lower into the leather seat.

"You'll have your own room," Arthur continued. "Your own space. That's important to me. It's a big house, and everyone needs somewhere that's theirs. And meals are communal, mostly. I like eating together. It's civilizing."

"How many people live there?" Theo asked. It came out before he could think about whether it was a safe question.

"Right now? Just the three of us, plus one other. He's Max, you'll meet him tonight. He's been with us...two years, now, is it, Reuben?" Arthur paused, waiting for Reuben to confirm or deny. He nodded once. "And Reuben, obviously. Reuben's been with me longest. Since we were children, actually."

Theo looked at Reuben. Reuben was still looking out the window. Since they were children. The sentence sat in Theo's mind and wouldn't lie flat.

Arthur kept speaking, Theo tried to keep listening, but it became difficult as the car turned into a long private road lined with trees. At the end of the road there was a house, a house he would be living in. The house was beautiful. Theo hated that it was beautiful. It was stone and wood and glass, sprawling across a manicured landscape, gardens visible to the east, a tree line to the north, something clearly old and expensive and cared for.

"Home." Arthur said with a small smile.

He was twenty years old today. He'd counted. There was a calendar at the facility, a paper grid pinned to the common room wall, and he'd tracked every day since intake, which had given him a lot of numbers to work with in his head. There had been the seven hundred and six days since the sky above him filled with smoke and other things that blocked out the sky, there was the eighteen months in the facility, and the twenty years of life before that which had been, prior to the first date, pretty good. But those twenty years had led him here.

The others on the platforms near him were still and compliant and were doing exactly what Theo has been supposed to be mastering the last eighteen months. They all had their eyes forward or down, they were breathing even, hands at their sides. This was basic stuff. This was Stage One. This was present yourself as calm, available, and undamaged. Do not speak unless addressed. Do not flinch when touched.

Theo had failed that module. He'd failed it seven times, actually, before the facility's lead assessor had signed off on a provisional pass with a note in his file that read: Manageable under controlled conditions. Residual startle response present.

Residual startle response. That was what they called it when you still flinched because the same person who had hit you twelve times in the past half-hour was raising their fist to do it again. Theo just couldn't shake it.

He was trying. He was standing still, with his eyes forward and his breathing even. He was trying so hard his jaw ached from clenching. Around him, the auction hall buzzed with buyers. They were well-dressed people, relaxed people, people with drinks in hand. It looked kind of like a farmer's market, everyone browsing the seller's wares. Some of them barely looked. Others stopped, consulted assistants or some documents on their phones, discussed among themselves. A few reached out and touched, placing a hand on a shoulder, fingers tilting a chin up, and the people on the platforms always always let them, because that was the training, that was what the facility had spent months installing: you are an object being assessed, and objects do not have opinions about being handled.

Theo watched a man three platforms down lift another person's arm, rotate it, press his thumb into the muscle of the forearm. The person didn't react, didn't flinch. They stood there with their arm held out like a mannequin and their face perfectly, terrifyingly blank.

Theo's stomach turned.

(A lifetime and eighteen months ago he had been a medic. Well, almost a medic. He'd been more than a year into his apprenticeship when the war started, and then the clinics emptied and the field hospitals filled and suddenly it did not matter if he had passed certain tests or knew certain medication names. Now he set bones in a tent while artillery hit the ridge above them. He'd learned what human beings look like dying, the color under the nails, the tension in the jaw, the way someone held their weight when something important was going away.

He couldn't turn it off. He'd never been able to turn it off and everyone around him was dying, all the time. Everyone looked like they were dying).

The person being handled three platforms down had yellowing at the edges of a bruise on their collarbone, three days old minimum. They distributed weight away from their left hip, probably from another injury, since they had the shallow breathing of someone managing pain they'd learned not to show. There were no doctors here to fix any of it. Theo stared at them, looking and not looking.

And then he saw the man who was about to buy him.

Arthur Carole moved through the auction hall like he owned it, which, Theo would learn later, he basically did. The Carole family had funded the building's renovation eight years ago. There was a plaque by the entrance.

He was tall, well-built, and younger than most of the buyers — late twenties, maybe, with dark hair above expensive clothes that were deliberately understated in the way only very rich people managed. Right now, he was against the wall, almost slumping, but even before he knew anything about him Theo could tell that this was not the type of man who slumped. He leaned. Quite possibly, he lounged. He looked very comfortable in the great mass of sweaty humanity that surrounded him, even though he couldn't look more different.

Behind him, half a step back and to the left, was another man. Taller, weirdly tall, the tallest person Theo had seen in the hall. He was similarly dark-haired, similarly mid-twenties, but visibly, unmistakably miserable.

This one wasn't a buyer. Theo clocked that immediately. The posture was wrong; he wasn't browsing, he wasn't shopping, he held the contained stillness of someone enduring something. His eyes were fixed on a middle distance that didn't exist. His shoulders were pulled in slightly, making himself smaller despite his height, and every few seconds his gaze would drift toward the exit and then snap back, like it was a reflex he was trying to suppress.

Owned, Theo thought, and then felt sick for how quickly the assessment had come.

The one who presumably did the owning was moving on. He began to look at a man six platforms down from Theo, a man standing in the trained stillness. He was studied for a moment, the other man's head, and then he reached out and took his face in both hands.

He rotated the face in his hands in this clear, proprietary way, his thumbs pressing into his cheekbones as he turned him left, right, tilted him back. He was examining the architecture of the man's face the way Theo had seen sculptors examine clay, looking for planes, angles, how the light would fall, how it would crack. His fingers pressed down on the skin beneath the man's jaw and he watched the color change under pressure, watched it flood back when he released.

"What do you think?" he said over his shoulder, not looking away from the man's face, which seemed to be working very hard not to look the man handling it in the eye. "The bone structure's good. Jaw's a little heavy."

The tall man behind him said nothing for a moment. Then, flatly: "I don't know, Arthur."

"Come on. You have an eye. Lighter bone structure photographs better, but there's something interesting about the heaviness. It's structural. Like a building." He was still holding his face, kneading his thumbs along his jawline. "Open your mouth."

The man opened his mouth. The other one—the one that had been called Arthur—looked inside the way you'd check a horse's teeth. The action sort of made Theo unable to breathe. It was one of the strangest fucking things he had ever seen. His planet (his dead, far away, lost forever planet) had been one of the few in the near universe without any real concept of slavery besides the knowledge that it happened somewhere else, and even after eighteen months of becoming oh-so-acquainted with the concept, there were still new ways to make his stomach turn. The way this man was kneading the people he examined, like he was trying to discover the plasticity of their skin, the way he released the man's face and moved on without buying, only to step to the next platform and run his hand down the arm of the boy next to him. He saw the man's hand grip suddenly, pressing hard into the bend of the boy's elbow, the skin blanching under his fingertip. The man was watching his capillaries refill. Theo couldn't possibly think of a reason for why.

The man moved on again. The one behind him followed like a shadow that didn't want to be attached to its source.

He was getting closer to him. Two platforms away now. Then one.

Arthur stopped at the person directly beside Theo. It was a boy, younger than Theo, eighteen maybe, thin and fragile looking, like he had been constructed out of toothpicks that could sway with the littlest breeze. He was not calm, but he was frozen. He reminded Theo of a of a rabbit that had spotted something with teeth, wide eyed and so so still.

He took the boy's chin and tilted his head then pressed his thumb into the hollow of the boy's throat. It couldn't have been hard enough to choke, but it must have been hard enough, because Theo could see the boy's pulse jump. Theo watched the man watch the pulse with interest. His other hand went to the boy's waist, tugged at the fabric of his shirt, pulling it taut so he could see the shape underneath.

"He's too thin, Reuben." Arthur murmured. "See the clavicles? Not even thin in an interesting way. Just thin." He let go and turned the boy around with a hand on his shoulder, studying his back. Now he sounded miserable. "There's nothing here."

He released the boy and turned toward Theo's platform.

And stopped.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Now it was Theo's turn to have a rabbit heart. For a moment, he felt outside his body, though it was hard to imagine what he could have possibly looked like, what feeling his face could have been showing. He knew what it felt like from the inside, holding fury so bright it felt like nausea, revulsion so complete it was physical, every lesson he had learned in the last stupid, cruel eighteen months screaming at him to go blank, go still, do nothing nothing nothing and yet he could feel it, he could feel his face refusing, doing what faces were supposed to do when they watched a human being get handled like clay.

Arthur stared at him. Theo stared back.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. Arthur's hand was still half-raised from releasing the boy beside Theo, like he had seen something so shocking and unexpected that it forced him into a completely frozen state. Then it broke.

"Oh," Arthur said softly. Then he smiled.

He stepped up to Theo's platform. This close, Theo could see his eyes — light things, warm amber-brown, and utterly focused. He could feel the full weight of the man's attention like a physical thing, like he already had a hand pressing down on Theo's chest.

"You're looking at me," Arthur said, "like you want to kill me."

Theo said nothing. His throat had closed.

"You are not doing a good job at hiding it. So obviously staring at me and you're just..." Arthur gestured at Theo's face. "Right here. All of it. Right on the surface. What's that about?" He sounded dreamy, and genuinely curious. He reached for Theo's face. Theo flinched.

It was not a small flinch. It was not the residual startle response the facility had documented and tried really really hard to beat out of him. Theo did a full-body recoil, his head jerking back, his shoulders coming up, his weight shifting to his back foot, every single instinct in him saying don't let this man touch you with a clarity that obliterated anything he learned in the last eighteen months in a single second.

Arthur's hands stopped in midair, he rose them up as if in surrender. His eyes widened slightly. And then his expression did something Theo couldn't parse. He went soft with a kind of wonder, like he was seeing something rare. Something he'd been looking for without knowing he was looking for it.

"When were you processed?" Arthur asked.

"Eighteen months ago," Theo managed. His voice sounded wrecked.

"Eighteen months?" Arthur's eyebrows rose. "And you still—" He gestured at Theo's posture, the visible tension, the flinch he hadn't been able to suppress. "How interesting."

He reached for Theo's face again, slowly this time, and Theo was once again thinking about horses, and he tried to only think of horses, trained horses, good horses. But he couldn't, he couldn't, and so his body moved before his brain could override it, pulling back, and Arthur's fingers caught his jaw and held. The grip was firm. Not painful, but immovable. He turned Theo's head the way he'd turned the others, the same exact pattern left, right, tilted back. He pressed his thumb into the skin below Theo's ear and Theo felt his own pulse hammering against the pressure. He could feel his skin contract under the man's hand, then bounce back sore.

"You're shaking," Arthur observed. He wasn't like. Making fun of him, or anything. He seemed fascinated. Interested, Theo guessed was the word he used. Interesting.

His other hand came up and pressed hard against Theo's cheekbone, and he felt the small bones of his face shift under the force of it. Theo tried not to buckle or whimper underneath him. It felt like even if he went completely limp in his grip, Arthur was not going to let go of his face.

"Reuben," he said, not turning around. "Come look at this."

The tall shadow stepped forward. He kept his hands stayed perfectly still at his sides and looked at Theo and then looked away quickly, like making eye contact was something he'd trained himself out of or had never properly learned in the first place. Then, he trained himself completely, totally towards Arthur. Something about that made Theo shudder too.

"Look at his eyes," Arthur said, still holding Theo's face. "That color. And do you see the expression quite present, given. Everything."

Reuben looked. And Theo saw something move behind what had previously been a very blank canvas, a flash of recognition, or pity, or memory, there and gone so fast he almost missed it. But he didn't. He saw it. He thinks he saw it.

"He's scared," Reuben said quietly and only to Arthur.

"Of course he's scared. Everyone in here is scared. But everyone else is pretending a lot better than he is. I find that charming." Arthur's thumb traced along Theo's jaw. "What planet are you from?"

"Adura," Theo said through his teeth.

"Adura." Arthur's grip softened slightly, not releasing but easing. "I read an article about that last year. I heard they took captives from the free people. This all must be very new for you, then."

"Yes. Everyone was free there." He wanted to flinch at his own words. He was a stupid idiot. He needed to stop talking.

"Yes." Arthur repeats, in the similar clipped tone Theo had choked out. He flattened his hand against Theo's face, just feeling. "So what were you? Before."

Theo almost didn't answer. But Arthur's hand was on his face and Arthur's eyes were on his and the question had an easy answer and withholding it felt stupid when there were larger battles coming.

"I, uh. Medicine," Theo said. "I was a medical apprentice."

Something shifted in Arthur's expression. A new layer of interest, as if Theo had just become three-dimensional.

"A doctor."

"Almost."

"How almost?"

"Um. Uh, I did eighteen months of apprenticeship. Plus field work during the war. I was—I was like. A field medic when we were taken."

Finally, finally Arthur released Theo's face and stepped back. Then Arthur laughed. Not cruelly, which would have been better, which would have made more sense, if he was making fun of Reuben, but with genuine, startled delight, like Theo had just done something wonderful.

"Oh," Arthur said. "Oh, you're perfect."

He grabbed one of the attendants of the auction house and told them that he wanted to purchase Theo. He didn't ask the price, didn't negotiate, didn't hesitate. Somewhere, a door was closing. A lock was clicking. This felt like the sort of thing Theo should stop. This was not the kind of thing Theo could stop.

"Reuben," Arthur said, already walking away after a seemingly large amount of money changed hands. "We're done. I found what I came for."

Reuben looked at Theo again, and again Theo saw the flash of something raw and quickly suppressed. Then he turned into a shadow again, turned and followed Arthur, and Theo stood on his numbered platform with the tag clipped to his new clean shirt and his hands shaking at his sides and knew, he knew he knew he knew.