Bill Underhill

A Slave is a Slave

Stories from the Comfort Complex

I. Sleepover

Chapters 15-20

Chapter 15

The sex slaves sometimes helped the servitors with chores around the complex. One of the servitors – 7-3-2-7 (the man who had helped to rescue Paul-2 and Roger from those bad strangers) – had explained to Roger that Hadleyville was only a very little comfort complex compared to the big ones you found in the cities, and all the grown-up men and women sex slaves here routinely did some of what the man had called 'donkey work'.

"I like helping you," Roger had said. "So do the grown-up sex slaves." A pause. "How come they get to wear work clothes when they do that, and us boys don't?"

7-3-2-7 had smiled. "Because you little guys are pretty. Even grown-up slaves like to look at you."

Mr. Cowper was learning how to be a DM, and a DM had to be cruel to sex slaves. Roger learned from 1-4-3-7 that the regular DMs were strict with Alan, too.

"Alan says that they're putting him through what he calls 'a course of sprouts'." There was something in Jimmy's voice that said he was proud of his friend. "Stuff that they say they should have learned early about handling slaves – and clients – but didn't get taught."

"Can't he be nice to you?" Roger asked.

Jimmy shrugged. "I don't think they'll let him. I, I think he loves me. Even when he does bad stuff to me, like with this thing–" the sandy-haired boy indicated his abstinence "–he does it kind of, well, nice, like the hurting and the nastiness is something special, just between him and me." 1-4-3-7 blinked at Roger, bewildered. "Can you do that? I mean, can a grown-up hurt a kid but love him at the same time?"

Roger shrugged. "I dunno. Can a kid love a grown-up who hurts him that way?" He raised an eyebrow, looking at 1-4-3-7. "If I were a grown-up, I could love you, I think. You're a nice boy." Roger leaned over and kissed Jimmy on the forehead.

1-4-3-7 smiled at Roger. "Would you hurt me, if you loved me?"

Roger grinned back. "Sure! I'd hurt you with the sex until you begged me to stop, and then I'd hurt you a lot more!"

They hugged each other, and Roger had sobered. "I like you, Jimmy." A pause. "Even though you kinda got me in this locked-up dickie-torture."

"Hey, it wasn't my fault!"

A couple of minutes later, the back door into the sex room had opened, and Mr. Cowper had come in. 1-4-3-7 had dropped to his knees in full submission, and without thinking, Roger had gone down on the floor right next to the older boy, his heart pounding. The big teenager looked strong and handsome in a DM's uniform that pretty obviously wasn't new. It must have been given to him by one of the older, regular DMs, but Alan Cowper wore it like it'd been made for him.

Mr. Cowper leaned over 1-4-3-7 and took the blue-eyed boy's head in his hands with firm, confident gentleness, gazing down at the child's adoring face. "You suffered well, slave."

"Th-thank you, Master."

"Gather up all the chains and cuffs and the rest. Bring them to the ready area, clean them and rack them, and then go to the same training room we've been using. Wait for me there."

"Yes, Master!" 1-4-3-7 got to his feet, collected all the 'packaging' (including Roger's), and went out into the service corridor. Roger heard the boy's bare feet slapping on the concrete as Jimmy ran off into the distance.

Roger looked up at the teenager, who was gazing at the back doorway, smiling.

"He was born to be a slave," Mr. Cowper said.

"Your slave, maybe," said Roger almost without thinking. The new DM looked at him. "I don't think he's good for being anybody else's slave, Master. He loves you."

The look in Mr. Cowper's eyes was a bit pained. "But he's not mine, Freckles. That's what they call you, isn't it? Freckles?"

Roger winced a little. "I'm 6-4-3-9, Master. Names aren't allowed."

The teenager laughed, but not a nasty laugh. "Yeah, they told me you hated that nickname." He walked over to where Roger was kneeling, and lifted the boy up to his feet. "I think it's a good name for you, though." One hand on the back of Roger's neck, his other fingers went back and forth over Roger's cheeks, doing the stupid 'counting' thing. "What used to be your name, then?"

"R-Roger, Master." Unconsciously, Roger touched his fingertips to the hard metal of the abstinence trapping his sex parts.

"Did you like your old name?"

Not wanting to meet the handsome adolescent's eyes, Roger gave a little shrug. "It, it's okay, Master."

"Better than 'Freckles', eh?"

Roger glanced up, nodded. "Lots better, Master."

"Okay, I'll call you Roger – when there's nobody senior around to hear." Mr. Cowper took Roger's head in his hands the way he'd held 1-4-3-7. "You've been a slave even less time than little Jimmy, haven't you?"

"Y-yes, Master."

"The customers seem to like you, though." Roger was intensely aware of the grown-up's regard, the strong fingers sliding through Roger's hair and across his brows and cheeks and playing with his ears. Roger made a soft moan, then blushed, trying not to look the handsome new DM in the eyes.

Mr. Cowper chuckled softly. "You like me, don't you?"

Roger blinked up at the man. "Sir? I mean, Master?" Roger realized that he'd put his own hands on Mr. Cowper's wrists, liking the hard muscles and the tendons he felt underneath the skin. But he didn't let go. "Master, I, I'm a slave boy."

He studied Mr. Cowper's face, wondering about that. Did he like the man?

The DMs used the slaves at the comfort complex for sex, sure, but not very often after a slave had been there for the first few weeks. One of them, a man lots older than Roger's mom, had explained to Roger that because there was a comfort complex in just about every county in the state, it wasn't much of a drive to go visit one of the others.

("We get so used to you kids here," the DM had continued – he'd been putting healing gel on the whip marks one of the clients had made all over Roger's back and bottom and legs – "that you're just not that sexy to us." The man had grinned as Roger gasped with the sting of the medicine. "Besides, there's a couple of boys over in Tuckerton who make even a pretty little kid like you look awful plain. You wanna see some pictures? Gorgeous!")

"Have you cleansed yet?" asked Mr. Cowper, and Roger was a little bit scared as he shook his head truthfully. You were supposed to cleanse your insides after your client left, not just sit on the bed like some kind of free kid with time to kill. There were other clients for a slave boy to serve, and if not, the DMs always had stuff for you to do, cleaning gear and watching training vids and like that.

Mr. Cowper shrugged and started taking off his uniform. "I don't mind sloppy seconds," he said. "Or will it be thirds?"

Roger sank to his knees in front of the grown-up, bending to untie Mr. Cowper's shoes.

"Thirds, Master." He glanced up, his eyes sad. "They each did me once."

"Who could blame them?" said Mr. Cowper, smiling down at Roger. His trousers fell open and he got his thumbs into the waistband of his underwear, pulling down the cloth to show a nice, hard grown-up penis.

"In your mouth, slave boy. Let me see you suck it again. Yes, like that, like a good little boy 3;"

Roger whimpered softly, the scent of grown-up maleness in his nostrils, the taste of grown-up dickie on his tongue, and he hoped that 1-4-3-7 wouldn't hate him for doing the sex with his friend.

Well, it wasn't as if Roger had any choice, right? And darn this abstinence!

Mr. Chriswell held Roger on his knee. The boy saw and felt that the man was holding him more firmly than he'd been holding Roger before he'd taken off Roger's slave collar, and he realized that the client could tell that Roger wasn't feeling good all of a sudden.

Actually, Roger had turned pale and clammy, and he'd gone kinda wobbly, the moment his collar had been unlocked and taken away from his neck. Mr. Chriswell had just been able to set it on the table before he'd had to take the boy in both hands to keep Roger from toppling away.

This was stupid. Roger had had his collar taken off at least twice since he'd been gotten out of the shipping box down in the basement of the complex. The DMs had had to test something once, and there was some kind of software update or something that had meant that Roger had to go without his collar for a couple of hours. Both times, though, Roger had been tied up before they'd taken it off him, and he'd been kept tied up until they'd put it back on.

Roger had figured that it was regulations or something. The DMs hadn't said anything, but as a slave, Roger had gotten used to the idea that he was going to be tied up or 'restrained' a lot. All those chains and stuff, even though as maybe the second-smallest slave in the comfort complex (that sexy seven-year-old was the only one littler), Roger didn't see how he was ever gonna be any kind of dangerous threat or anything.

But Roger realized that this was the first time he'd ever had his collar taken off while he wasn't tied up. He looked at Mr. Chriswell, more than a little bit scared. Who was this grown-up, anyway?

"Feeling better now?" The man's eyes weren't cruel, just 3; not nice. Roger sensed that Mr. Chriswell was judging him, and Roger didn't know what the man wanted to see. Was it what clients usually expected to see in a slave boy? The submission? The shame? The fear?

"I-I'm okay, sir. Thank you."

The man chuckled. "Yes, your color looks better." Mr. Chriswell kept his left hand on Roger's back, but with his right he slid fingers around the boy's neck where the collar had been. "No chafing. The officers here are taking good care of the inventory, aren't they?"

"Sir?" Roger took a second to understand. "Sir, the Discipline Masters make sure we don't get sores from the collars, or anything like that. They make sure the gel gets put on us, almost every day." He straightened up a little. "We're valuable government property, sir."

Mr. Chriswell smiled at that, his fingers sliding up to play with Roger's ears, and then with the boy's hair. "I'm sure that's not the only reason they're so attentive." Then the man leaned down and kissed Roger on the lips. Not a "sexy" kiss, but a very nice, favorite-uncle kind of kiss, which Roger got from some of his clients, especially after they'd done the sex to him and wanted to show how much they'd liked it.

Roger had thought that a 'tip' was something you left on the table for the waitress after you were done eating at a sit-down restaurant, but one of the grown-up servitor slaves had explained to the boy that clients at a comfort complex sometimes left behind a little bit of money or something else as a thank-you gift for the servitors when they finished up in a sex room.

But what could a slave – even a grown-up servitor, who got to wear clothes – spend money on?

The servitor had rumpled Roger's hair and grinned at the boy. "In the bad old days, before the Crack-Up," the man had said, "convicts would use money to get all sorts of nasty things brought in to them. Drugs and booze, for instance."

But the medical chips everybody had would spot anything like that, and report it the next time they were scanned, the man had explained.

"And these collars –" he'd flicked the edge of Roger's slave collar with a fingernail "– not only monitor your blood and tissue chemistry in real-time but they can inject you with counteragents that make you puke your guts up if there's any trace of fun stuff in your system. Heck, slaves can't even smoke or chew tobacco."

The grown-up guy had sighed deeply. "So it's not just the sex drive they take away from us worker bees."

So the clients left little gifts behind. Sometimes candy, sometimes print-on-paper magazines, the kind you didn't need a pad to read, even old-fashioned books. Lots of clients would arrange to bring stuff in for the servitors and the servitors would pay for it with the money they'd gotten in tips.

"Harmless stuff," the grown-up slave explained, "so the DMs don't sweat it much." He'd smiled. "The female sex slaves put in their pitch for make-up and even perfumes, and share it with the women servitors. Almost all of the ladies like to doll themselves up a bit. It's good for their morale."

The slave boys (and girls), though, didn't get much of anything from the clients that they could keep for themselves. I mean, where could a naked slave kid keep anything of his own? Jeez, you never even got the same cage in the quarters downstairs from one day to another.

The servitors got to go everywhere in the complex, just about, because they did most of the routine stuff to keep the place running. They had lots of places to hide things, and when the stuff they got wasn't more than 'officially' unapproved – the DMs treated grown-up slaves a lot differently than they treated slave boys and girls, which wasn't fair, but they were grown-ups, and when were grown-ups ever fair? – the DMs didn't enforce the 'contraband' rules too much.

Besides, when the servitors got candy and other nice things to eat, they did share them with the sex slaves and even with the DMs. A guy didn't get much, but something was better than nothing.

But a slave boy almost always got clients who liked him. Sure, they did the sex to you (and most all of them enjoyed hurting a kid with the sex), but they'd be nice to you if you weren't a total horse's patoot. All you had to do, really, was keep a servile tongue in your mouth and do the submissive' behavior properly. The regular clients would let you know if it was okay to act almost like a real kid, and then the sexing got almost kinda friendly.

But always you had to be polite. No-brainer, that bit.

When Mr. Chriswell finished kissing Roger, the boy had regarded the client with a slightly dreamy expression, then glanced one side and the other to see how Julia was taking this invasion of her preserve. Roger figured that she might resent another kid hugging and kissing with 'her' grown-up, but when he saw her kneeling on the floor and watching, the girl was smiling at him. She obviously knew that her owner – who had acted so cold and scary at first – really liked slave boys.

That didn't mean Mr. Chriswell might not turn out to be a spanker or a whipper or a flat-out torturer, of course. Roger thought he could handle that, because of the stuff they'd done to him at the indoctrination center and during his time at the comfort complex, but he hoped – he really hoped – that the man wasn't into the 'poop' stuff. Even the 'pee' stuff wasn't too bad compared to that.

Roger was pretty sure that he was never going to learn how to like the 'poop' business. It wouldn't kill you, but just thinking about some parts of what they could do to you that way made you want to yurp up that nice shepherd's pie, didn't it?

But there was no way that Roger could imagine Mr. Chriswell being a 'poop' type. Tall, confident, coldly elegant in front of the DM's desk, knowing so much about stuff like shepherd's pie and brandy and all the things that you never saw or heard of in a little town like Hadleyville or the place where Roger had used to live 3; Heck, Mr. Chriswell might not even want to do the sex to a dumb, inexperienced eight-year-old slave like Roger.

Jeez, what did it say about a boy when he was anxious about not getting a grown-up dickie shoved up his bottom?

"You don't find much love here, do you, beautiful boy?" Mr. Chriswell asked the question in an even tone. "I think you didn't have much love in the life you lived before they enslaved you, either."

"S-sir?" Roger shifted a little, suddenly uncomfortable in the man's arms. "My, uh, my mom loved me, sir." He thought about the way his mother had looked at him, her eyes gone blank with 3; something 3; as they'd stripped Roger in the courtroom, as they'd put the collar on him, as they'd walked him out the door in the front of the room. "She 3; just couldn't stop them from making me a slave, sir. She couldn't."

"Very few women really love little boys your age," said Mr. Chriswell gently. "You were growing out of dependency upon her, starting to make a place for yourself in the world, a place she knew she couldn't control, and most mothers resent that." The man smiled. "They can keep their closeness with their daughters, most of them. But sons strive to escape their mothers, to no longer need them, and mothers take that as a rejection." Mr. Chriswell's touch was very firm, but very tender.

"Julia," said the man in a tone of command, and the slave girl stood up at his elbow. "Take this boy to the bed with you and –" he smiled "– cuddle him. I know that you need some sleep, and I think a nap would be good for him, too."

"Yes, Master." The slave girl smiled at Roger. "Come on, boy," she said, pulling him to his feet. "You heard the Master."

Roger let himself be led to the bed, and climbed up on it with the strange little girl. He'd fallen asleep with one of the two slave girls he'd been picked with for a 'four-way', but only after the two grown-up clients had done all kinds of sex to them and they'd worn her out with the orgasms.

Well, they'd kinda done that to Roger, too, but girls aren't as tough as boys, right?

This was the first time that Roger had been told by a client to lie down and take a nap without being all sweaty and exhausted and covered with slippery stuff or sticky grown-up sperms. Julia pulled Roger up to snuggle, tucking her nose into the boy's collar-less neck and sighing happily as she nuzzled him.

He put his arms around her, ignoring the fact that she was obviously taller than Roger and had really good muscles, figuring that because she was a girl and he was a boy, Roger had to kind of take care of her, and he rubbed his lips and his nose against the buzzed-close hair that had made her look so much like a boy when he'd first seen her.

She smelled nice. Not at all the way he thought a girl would normally smell, all kinda perfume-y. Just clean and warm, like one of his friends when he slept over. He realized after just a couple of minutes that she'd fallen asleep, and he moved his arm a little so her weight wouldn't make it go numb for him. He hesitantly put his lips against her forehead and gave her a kind of a big-brother kiss, settled his head on the pillow, and let himself relax.

No way Roger could fall asleep this early in the afternoon, right? Well, he could just rest for a bit, anyway. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten so much good food. Mom didn't really cook very often.

Oh, yes, he could remember the last time. At that little restaurant place with the DM from the indoctrination center, the night Roger first got made a slave. He wondered how they made those big croquette things with the crunchy crust all around 3;

***

When Roger blinked his eyes open, it took him a few seconds to make sense of where he was. The kid snuggled up to him had moved a little in his sleep – no, her sleep; he could see the glint of the golden padlock holding the lips of her vee together down there. Roger decided that she had moved her leg, exposing her private zone. Her breathing was deep and regular, and he watched her swallow and then gasp a little breath and shift some more. Had Roger fallen asleep? Jeez.

He rolled over onto his back, slowly, not wanting to wake Julia up, and as his head turned he saw Mr. Chriswell seated at the table, little tools in his hands, concentrating on a bunch of shiny silvery bits and pieces in front of him.

Hey, that's my collar!

Well, it'd be Roger's collar when – if – the man put it back together.

"Go empty yourself." Mr. Chriswell didn't even bother to look up from his work. He kept his voice low. Roger acknowledged the command with an equally low "Yes, sir," and went over to the little bathroom to put his pee in the toilet, something he couldn't have even imagined doing without closing the door when he'd been a real boy.

His hands washed and dried, Roger returned to the bedside, regarding the naked stranger carefully. You could tell that the tall, handsome grown-up was comfortable in his skin, as if all three of them were at one of the beaches where everybody went around without clothes. A bunch of times, Roger's mom had taken him to the beach at a lake near where he'd used to live, and it was really weird but none of the men there got stiffies much. After a while, neither did Roger or most of the other boy kids. The only real difference between that place and a water park had been no fancy rides and if you wanted to use the sliding boards in the playground, you had to grab one of the pieces of rough cloth they kept draped over these towel bar-type things out there.

If you tried to slide on your bare butt, mostly you just didn't. And you didn't try it more than once, though a couple of kids had slicked up one of the slides with suntan oil, and that had been kinda interesting.

Way too doggone fast, and the grown-ups had freaked out, but interesting.

"Sit here, next to me, boy."

Roger drew a chair up beside Mr. Chriswell's, and sat down on the front edge of it, forgetting that he didn't have the plug thing in his bottom. Boy, you got used to those plugs, didn't you?

"I have been modifying, re-designing, and designing components in these collars ever since I was your age, boy." Mr. Chriswell raised his head a bit and looked at Roger.

Pointing to something on the table, the man named Roger's date of birth. "Correct?"

Roger nodded. "Yes, sir. My collar told you that?"

"Of course." The man sighed. "Such a clumsy conglomeration. You know what a helicopter is, don't you, boy?"

Again Roger nodded. He'd even the black ones flying around, enforcing the Agenda 21 regulations near his old neighborhood.

"Back in the early days of rotary-wing aviation," Mr. Chriswell went on, "the running joke was that a helicopter is nothing more than fifty thousand spare parts flying around in close formation." He smiled. "It's the job of the technicians – men like me – to keep that formation flying as tightly as possible."

Spare parts? Then Roger thought about one of the boys in his neighborhood who'd had a radio-controlled little helicopter, and how the bits of it came apart and went back together if you knew how everything worked. He'd nodded then, not smiling. Stuff could come apart in a real helicopter, and then you'd be in big trouble.

"My collar is like that, sir? A bunch of parts?" He nodded at the components on the table. Roger had always thought of it as a solid circle of grown-up power around his throat, heavy and strong and something he would never escape, ever again, as long as he lived.

And now it was all spread apart on the table in front of Mr. Chriswell.

Roger supposed that it ought to make him feel good to see it like that, but it didn't. It made him more than just a little nervous, all upset and even 3; afraid. What would happen if a DM came in here, right now, and found Roger looking like a real boy – an outsider, never supposed to be allowed inside a comfort complex, even though he had a slave tattoo on his leg – and just chucked him outside?

Were could Roger go? Bare-naked and not even knowing what state Hadleyville was in? Nobody had ever told him, and he'd never thought – not once – to ask. He was sure that one of his nicer clients would tell him, but did he want to know?

How to get home?

If there was even a home left after what had happened to Roger's mom.

The only place that Roger belonged was right here, in this comfort complex, inside the 'perimeter' where a slave's collar would give you a really nasty stinger if you got too close to the boundary, and then knock you down in agony if you tried to cross.

This was 3; home. And there was Roger's collar, the guts of it all spread apart and incapable of holding Roger here. He felt kind of dizzy for an instant, as if the world was about to throw him off and out into space. He had to swallow hard before that feeling went away.

Roger looked up at Mr. Chriswell and saw the man looking down at him. Understanding what Roger was thinking. You could tell! What was this man?

In the space on the table right in front of Roger, Mr. Chriswell put six different little bits of what had been in the guts of Roger's collar.

"Fit them together," the man ordered.

Hesitantly, glancing up at the man, Roger reached for the hard, shiny-dull, silvery-and-black-and-brown pieces of metal and plastic, turning them over between his fingertips, one at a time, then concentrating. Didn't this go here? No, there. And this one went at this end, then the other one fitted underneath, and 3;

Roger looked up at Mr. Chriswell again. "Does it go like this, sir?"

The man nodded. "How else could they go together?"

Roger was puzzled. "Sir? But they can't go together any other way, sir." He stared briefly at the assemblage he'd completed, then shook his head. "They wouldn't fit any other way." Again, Roger looked up at Mr. Chriswell. "How could they?"

"Someday," said the man, "you may learn why you're right." He reached for the six put-together bits and moved them back to where the rest of the collar parts were laid out on the table.

"This is a clumsy design," Mr. Chriswell said, and Roger knew that the man was talking to himself as much as he was talking to Roger. "A generation out of date. When I was a year or two older than you are now, after I'd torn apart and reassembled these things enough times to have lost count, I was allowed to order elements from a few commercial suppliers." He smiled at Roger.

"I duplicated all these functions –" he nodded at the scatter of collar components "– in a plastic candy mint pack. One of those things you carry in your pocket and shake out the bits one by one." Mr. Chriswell sighed. "Now," he continued, "I can do even more. Everything your collar can do, I can manage in a volume about half the size of a cough drop, and it could be implanted here –" the man reached over with one hand and touched the back or Roger's neck, just beneath the base of his head "– so that you wouldn't even know that it was there."

"Even the shock thing? The way you get a sting from your collar if you go too far outside?"

The man nodded. "Certainly."

"So why don't they do it?" Roger studied Mr. Chriswell's face. "Why don't they use your little thing instead of these collars?"

Again, Mr. Chriswell sighed. "When I put the proposal to the Slave Authority, I was told that the collar is a symbol." He looked intently at Roger. "Do you understand what a symbol is, boy?"

"Yes, sir. It's a sign. It means something." Roger thought for a second. "A question mark is a symbol. If you look at it one way, it's just a squiggle with a period underneath, but what it means is kinda 'What the heck?' And it tells you how a sentence is supposed to sound. Instead of saying 'This is wrong', you're asking 'This is wrong?' Like that."

The boy paused. "So it's that when you see somebody with a collar around his neck, you know that he's a slave." He thought about that time at the restaurant, with the waitress lady. "A symbol of being a slave, so people won't mistake you for being a real person."

"Not just for other people," said Mr. Chriswell. "For the slave himself." He frowned at the casing of the collar – the outside parts, made of brushed stainless steel, with gleaming hinges and the 'teeth' of the locking mechanism. "These are far heavier than they need to be. I could get the same strength and rigidity with aircraft aluminum, and with composites 3;"

Mr. Chriswell shrugged. "These slave collars could be beautiful, little boy. Graceful." He regarded Roger, face and body. "And on you, a slave collar should be beautiful. But the Slave Authority people want these symbols to be heavy, to be ugly, to bear down upon you the weight of your enslavement. To make you feel it."

Roger nodded his understanding. "So that you never forget that you're a slave, sir."

"To never forget that you're a slave, yes." The man quirked an eyebrow at Roger. "You weren't happy in school, were you, boy?"

"Sir?" Roger blinked, looked down at the tabletop, felt himself blushing. Did every kid with freckles have the same problem with blushing, that everybody could see you were embarrassed? "School was, uh, okay."

Mr. Chriswell's chuckle was low and short and nasty. "You hated it. And they hated you, didn't they?"

Doggone that blushing! Roger could feel his face gone all hot. "I guess, maybe 3;" He looked up. "I tried, sir. Honest."

"The records –" Mr. Chriswell pointed to something among the pieces on the tabletop "– say that you didn't respond to the drugs."

Roger flashed a guilty look at Mr. Chriswell. "I, I stopped taking them, sir. They made me feel so stupid, so awful."

"Hm? How could you stop taking the drugs, boy? Didn't your mother dose you every morning? There's notes in your record that said you'd been on directly observed therapy in school. You were given your pills under supervision."

The habit of concealment was still strong, but 3; What can they do to me? Make me a slave?

"You don't have to swallow, sir. So I didn't."

Mr. Chriswell smiled. "But your behavior improved." A pause. "Or so they reported."

It was Roger's turn to shrug. "I just did what they wanted me to do, sir. It wasn't hard to pretend, I guess."

"Ah. The way you're pretending now."

Chapter 16

If there had been a mirror, Roger would've been able to see his face go pale. "Pretending, sir? H-how can you pretend to be a slave?" The boy glanced down at his right leg, then looked up at the client. "Even though you took off my collar, took it apart, I'm still a slave. I'm for grown-ups to use for the sex, sir." He swallowed hard. "For you to use, sir."

"You weren't born to be a slave, were you, boy?" The man's eyes were gentle but there was a flicker of cruelty in them. "You don't think like a slave yet, and you don't truly feel like one." Mr. Chriswell sighed. "You're pretending, no matter what you've been told about having died and lost yourself to enslavement. You fall to your knees, you grovel, and you suffer – not just the rape of your masculinity but the pain and the humiliation and all the contempt these yokels heap on you – and yet you're still the same observant, thoughtful, feeling little boy you were when they brought you into that courtroom, all of them knowing that you were going to be sacrificed to the god of government."

Mr. Chriswell shook his head. "I do business with the government, boy. Or, rather, the government does business with my company, and the company is a very tightly held proprietary. But the government does not own me."

With his left hand, the man reached out very precisely and brushed the back of his fingers against Roger's lips and cheek, a gesture of tenderness that surprised but didn't startle.

"As they own you, little one."

Roger shrugged, just a bit. "Somebody has to own me, sir." He cleared his throat. "I, I can't own myself, can I?"

Mr. Chriswell nodded agreement. Then he beckoned Roger to him. As the man took the naked little boy on his knee again, one arm around the narrow eight-year-old shoulders, Roger thought that his dickie really ought to be going hard, but it kinda didn't.

"This is true, perfectly true." He looked thoughtfully at Roger. "But to become a proper slave, you must be made to commit yourself to the ownership of those who possess you. Captured and properly raped into slavery, you would know yourself to be a sexual sacrifice, given unwillingly but completely to the satisfaction of men's lust for you, for your body, for your mind, and for your soul."

The man's fingers were all along Roger's face again, the tips of those fingers running up and down Roger's ear, moist with Roger's tears, because Roger was crying. Not sobbing or anything like that, but definitely crying from the sadness of what Mr. Chriswell was saying.

"But, sir, then I can't be a proper slave boy." He sniffled, but didn't raise his hands to his face, leaving them down at his sides. "Not the way you mean The government men keep me here, they exercise me and train me and make me serve the clients – like you, sir – but I don't have any person to really own me."

Roger glanced at the sleeping girl. "Not the way Julia does, sir."

Mr. Chriswell gave a gentle chuckle. "Julia was made for her purpose, boy. She was constructed – very carefully! – in a laboratory to provide me with the sons my family requires to continue and expand our line. She knows it, and though she now and then longs for something other than a life as a breeder, she realizes that without that role, she would never have come into existence. She's a very intelligent child, and will be a brilliant woman, and that's a tragedy with which we must cope."

"Tragedy, sir?"

"Breeder slaves must be intelligent to yield the best possible offspring," Mr. Chriswell explained, "but an intelligent slave is seldom docile, much less content. She is already being educated in mathematics and technology, and her performance continues to prove her excellence. She spends time with many of my most brilliant employees as her tutors. It's nothing but mental exercise, though, to strengthen her mind as physical conditioning strengthens her body."

Roger looked at the sleeping girl. You could already tell that she was a lot different from any of the other girls he'd ever known, real or slave. Roger kept his voice low, even though he spoke without thinking. "She's very nice, sir."

"She accompanies me everywhere now," said the man. "Except for times when I must be at places where her presence is forbidden. For a few weeks, in a bit more than a month from now, I'll have to leave her with someone else. As a female – of any age – Julia isn't allowed where I'm going. She'll spend those weeks at the little breeding farm we maintain, believing that she's apprenticing in obstetrics."

He smiled. "She's been to the farm many times before. The sluts consider her a lucky mascot. The ones who deliver while she's visiting seem to have shorter, easier labors. You, on the other hand 3;"

Mr. Chriswell's smile faded into a thoughtful expression. "You could accompany me where I'll be going, boy. You are male. More, you are spermless, and so you may be received there."

Oh? thought Roger. That's nice. Of course, being a slave, Roger had been told that he wouldn't be going anyplace from this comfort complex except in a travel box, like the way he'd been shipped here.

"Once having arrived," Mr. Chriswell continued, "you would just never be allowed to leave. No boy ever has."

That was a little puzzling. Roger hadn't been a slave very long, but he knew that sex slaves were switched from one comfort complex to another every now and then. Not often, but when the clients in one place got tired of a boy – or any other kind of sex slave, but most of them were boys – the DMs moved the kid to someplace where he was 'new' to the clients. Lots of average-looking boy slaves got remanded all over the place like that, but one of the DMs had told Roger that because he was a redhead, it probably wouldn't happen to Roger for a long time.

("You look too much like how everybody thinks the all-American boy next door should look," the DM had said, and then the man had smiled. "Though if the little boy next door had looked like you, I might've wound up serving a few years in slavery myself, for giving in to the temptation.")

The DMs at Hadleyville had all used Roger pretty often for the first few weeks after he'd been unboxed. One of the training men at the indoctrination center had told the boy that it would happen that way. It was called 'sampling the merchandise'. After that, though, Roger had been getting used by one or another of the DMs here maybe twice a week.

So Mr. Chriswell knew a comfort complex where they only had boy slaves, and girls weren't allowed. And once a slave got there, he stayed there. Did that sound like it'd be any worse than spending your whole life in a place like this one? Or getting boxed up and shipped to some other place where another set of DMs would 'sample the merchandise' because you were a new piece of filth for them to use?

Then Roger had a thought, and he looked at Mr. Chriswell. "You don't hate slaves, do you, sir?"

The man hesitated for an instant, giving Roger a 'Where did that come from?' look. Then Mr. Chriswell's look became all intense, studying Roger the way grown-ups did sometimes.

"Not particularly, boy."

Roger accepted this gravely. "Do you like slaves, sir?"

The man's expression hardened. "Not particularly, either. Do I pity them? Do I support abolition? Not in the least."

When a grown-up man is naked in front of a sex slave like Roger, and his dickie isn't hard, you can tell that he's more interested in other stuff than he is in doing the sex to a boy slave. Mr. Chriswell didn't have a hard-on, and he was talking to Roger in a low voice to keep from waking up his personal little girl slave.

He was talking to Roger as if Roger was a real boy, and not a sex slave piece of filth.

Which meant that Mr. Chriswell actually did like Roger, didn't it? Sort of, at least.

But he had to ask.

"Sir?" Roger felt his stomach tighten. "Do you hate me?"

The man's cruel face changed just the least little bit. Mr. Chriswell's hand settled on the back of Roger's neck, not hard or hurting, but making Roger know that he wasn't allowed to look away.

"I don't know you well enough to hate you, boy. What I do know about you leads me to wish that one of our agents had found you before you'd been made a chattel of the Slave Authority."

With his other hand, Mr. Chriswell reached up to touch Roger's face again, the fingertips gliding over the boy's forehead and cheeks and eyelids and nose and lips. When they got that far, Roger was suddenly aware that his dickie had gone stiff again. What Mr. Chriswell was doing – well, it was nice. It was the kind of thing a grown-up did when he liked you, right?

And Roger wanted Mr. Chriswell to like him. The man liked Julia, didn't he? If Mr. Chriswell could like one slave kid, couldn't he like Roger? Please, couldn't he like Roger?

There were tears on Mr. Chriswell's fingertips again, and Roger felt his nose getting runny, and that made him embarrassed.

I'm such a doggone baby!

"I would have raped you, boy." The man's voice was warm, low, caressing. "I would have stripped you as you struggled to escape, bound you into helplessness, and forced you against your will. You would have resisted, you would have cried out, you would have begged and pleaded, and still I would have raped you. Do you understand this?"

Sniffling, Roger swallowed hard and nodded. "Yes, sir. I understand. But I wouldn't be mad at you for it. Honest."

The man said nothing, watching Roger.

"Well 3;" The boy looked at Mr. Chriswell. "Maybe not too much. How, uh, do you like to do the rape to a guy, sir? I've had the rape done to me some times, and there are ways –" Roger paused, looking at Mr. Chriswell's eyes "– well, ways that it's not so bad for a kid."

Mr. Chriswell chuckled. "I would've raped you, boy, and that rape would've been a test to determine your suitability for enslavement. But we've been robbed of that opportunity, haven't we?"

Reluctantly, Roger nodded. It was kinda disappointing, wasn't it? Getting the rape game done to him by Mr. Chriswell might even be kinda 3; Well, maybe 'fun' wasn't the right word but – Roger studied the man, who had nice muscles and was really good-looking – it wasn't exactly the wrong word, either.

Okay, so the word was sexy. And that wasn't a word Roger would've ever used before he got slaved and made to get the sex done to him by grown-ups.

Then Roger realized that the way Mr. Chriswell meant it, the rape wouldn't be a game. He looked at the man's eyes with something like surprise. It would've been real rape. Roger wouldn't have known anything about the sex. Not the way he knew about sex after that first night at the indoctrination center. Sure, he'd thought about sex when he'd been a real boy, but as a real boy, Roger's ideas had been just plain 3; dumb.

That's what Mr. Chriswell wanted. This big, powerful, careful grown-up wanted a real boy to rape, a boy who didn't know anything about the sex. For a boy like that, what Mr. Chriswell wanted to do would be just horrible, wouldn't it?

It flashed through Roger's mind. Clothes just ripped right off, maybe your hands tied behind your back, humiliated by getting stripped naked by a stranger, his eyes seeing everything about you, all the hidden parts of you that no real boy was ever supposed to let anybody look at, except maybe at the beach or in the swimming pool, but never in that way! The man's own grown-up body strange and frightening, the big stiffie like nothing a real boy could ever have gotten to see before, no enemas to get you clean inside before the man's penis got pushed inside you 3;

That thought, fleeting as it was, almost made Roger sick to his stomach. To be so dirty inside for a grown-up's penis to go there. A penis was special, wasn't it? When somebody's penis was hard for you, even if he was just another kid, it was because you were sexy for him, and even if the guy was mean to you, even if he spanked you or did torture to you, his stiffie said that you were special to him, that the sight of you made him want you for the sex.

When a grown-up gets a boner looking at me, Roger thought, it means he likes me.

He glanced down at Mr. Chriswell's middle and felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach when he saw that Mr. Chriswell had a hard-on. Back up at Mr. Chriswell's face.

Does he like me enough?

"H-how could you slave me, sir? If I was a real boy, and not 3;" Roger felt his face go hot, and he turned his gaze away, both embarrassed about being a piece of slaveboy filth and angry about being embarrassed. "If I wasn't a slave already, sir." He looked back at Mr. Chriswell.

"If you caught me, and, and raped me, and I was right for you to make into a slave, how could you do it? Only a judge can do that, right?"

The smiling grown-up laughed. "Boy, the members of our order had been enslaving little ones like you for almost a hundred years before the Indentured Servitude and Human Chattels Control Act was more than a sheet of paper put before the eyes of a properly bribed politician."

And Mr. Chriswell began to explain.

***

Before the man had gone on very long, Roger had interrupted. "Sir," he'd said anxiously, looking around the room, then lowering his voice to a whisper. "Sir, they can hear you. They, uh, they listen to what's going on in these sex rooms. I think they can see what's happening, too."

Mr. Chriswell had shaken his head. "No. Not in this room. Not while I occupy it."

Roger had looked at the man without believing him. "Sir, what you're telling me 3; it could get you in a lot of trouble! If they hear you 3;"

"Boy, who do you think designed and maintains the surveillance systems in these complexes?"

***

Mr. Chriswell belonged to an 3; organization. Membership wasn't exactly passed along from father to son, but it was mostly like that. Uncles and nephews, or cousins, or something like that. All of the members were men. All of them were super-wealthy. All of these men were 'connected', but none of them were people you ever heard anything about. No big-time politicians. No celebrities.

Some were science guys or engineers, techies like Mr. Chriswell. Some were professors, some were businessmen, lots were a mixture of all that and more. All of them liked to do the sex to boys.

Which was normal, Roger knew. Everybody liked to do the sex to boys, right? If there weren't boy slaves in the comfort complexes so that citizens could use the kids who got slaved to do the sex (and there's nothing else a boy slave could be good for – except maybe spare parts!), then those grown-ups might do the sex to real boys, and that was against the law.

Once a grown-up had done the sex to a regular free boy enough times, it made that boy not good for doing the sex to women once the kid got big enough for that. The doctors all said that, right?

Roger couldn't disagree with that. In the indoctrination center and then here in the comfort complex, Roger hadn't just had the sex done to him by grown-up men, but he'd been forced to let women use him for the sex, and he'd had to do really disgusting stuff so that those ladies could have their orgasms.

After that, how could any boy want to have any kind of sex with ladies?

Little girls weren't so bad, of course. Actually, Roger had kinda liked the girls he'd been made to do the sex with. But women were just awful. Maybe Roger would've thought about them differently if he'd waited until he got grown-up to have sex, but almost all the things woman clients did to boy slaves were just about guaranteed to make a guy want to throw up.

It could be pretty easy for a slave boy to get used to grown-up men doing the sex to him. What kid didn't play dickies with other boys? And men knew how it was to be a little boy. That gave them a heckuva lot more advantage than just being bigger and stronger.

Besides, every boy Roger had ever known thought a lot about how men did sex to slave boys, and played pretend slave sex games.

Sure, getting a man's big penis in your bottom always hurt (and grown-up men sure liked hurting a boy that way), but Roger couldn't see anything to argue with about the fact that getting a grown-up man's sperms pushed up inside your bottom – and swallowing the stuff when they made you suck them all the way – changed a little boy forever and ever.

If a slave boy was good for nothing else but getting the sex done to him, the things they did to you in the indoctrination place – from the first time you got a grown-up penis up inside you and you got the slave mark on your leg – all of that made you dead when it came to being a real boy, and just a filthy animal kept for the pleasure of law-abiding citizens.

They called it 'spiritual murder', right?

What had happened to Roger that evening at the indoctrination center had been a kind of murder, all right. From the moment that man had put his penis up inside Roger's bottom, Roger had been made dead for growing up and becoming a daddy. What the men at the indoctrination center had done after that – all the sex-torture and the punishment and the beatings and the rape stuff, all of that – had been to make sure that Roger's soul had been absolutely and totally killed, that whatever was left of Roger's nature as a real boy after he'd been stripped naked in the judge's courtroom wasn't going to survive.

So all that was left when they put Roger in that box to ship him off to Hadleyville was a proper little sex slave, good for nothing but being used like a dirty animal.

The government couldn't let grown-ups do sex to real boys because of the 'spiritual murder' thing. You had to have boys growing up to be men who wanted the sex with women because if you didn't, you'd have all kinds of trouble making babies. That was the reason for the baby farms, to use slave woman to make babies – really good babies (which the farm baby kids always tried to rub your nose in) – that real ladies could adopt.

The boys who got term-indentured as sex slaves because of disciplinary problems (and there were never more than a very, very few of those kids) got some kinda special 'therapy' after they were judged okay to go back to being regular human beings.

Maybe it worked to make a boy 'un-murdered', but whenever he thought about it, Roger figured that not many of those disciplinary kids passed their 'exams' at the end of those terms. He'd never met any of those guys, but Roger figured that most of them wound up condemned for life, just like the filthy little animals in the Hadleyville Comfort Complex.

For all the children who got enslaved, how could things work out any other way? What was the Slave Authority gonna do with real boys who were turned into slaves? Or when boys couldn't pass their sexual aggressiveness tests and be allowed to grow up, what else could you do but make them into sex slaves for the rest of their lives?

(Or cut off their balls. Yeesh.)

What did they do with kids whose parents broke the law back before there was slavery, anyway? Kill them? Roger shuddered. Being a sex slave was pretty awful, but it was sure better than getting dead-for-real!

But according to Mr. Chriswell, there were 3; organizations? 3; that had been making boys into sex slaves back before the Slavery Law had been passed.

Well, that made sense. There had to be slaves for the sex, right? And grown-ups had always wanted to do the sex to little boys. It was only natural.

These organizations were still working, still secret, and Mr. Chriswell belonged to one of them.

Roger regarded his client with great respect. These grown-ups had been making boys into sex slaves for years and years before the government had made the Slave Law, and even though the judges and everybody Roger had ever heard of all said that only the government could make people into slaves, the men running Mr. Chriswell's organization had kept right on slaving boys for the sex and keeping those kids hidden. For years and years and years.

They'd started out by slaving orphan boys, but they'd always kidnapped regular kids, too. This was at least a little bit of an explanation for how real children just kinda disappeared.

"Of course, the vast majority have always been taken by outsiders," Mr. Chriswell explained, looking solemnly into Roger's eyes. "Most of these are simply murdered, even today. A rare few of them grow up as the adopted children of their kidnappers, living out their lives in the secret of their origins." The man had shrugged. "If they're stolen young enough, they just forget who their birth families had been, and cope. Boys are very good at coping, aren't they?"

Roger thought about 1-4-3-7 and Mr. Cowper. Jimmy seemed to be coping pretty good, wasn't he? As long as it was his ex-neighbor doing lots of sex to him, Jimmy was actually kind of happy to be a slave boy now, even when he had some of the clients doing really nasty stuff to him. Jimmy had somebody special, somebody who – let's face it – loved him. Judiciously, therefore, Roger nodded.

There were different organizations doing this all over the world, Mr. Chriswell said. Some of them slaved boys and girls both, but most just took all boys or all girls. Some took mostly orphans, some mostly kidnapped regular kids. Members of the organizations shipped their slaves all over the world, even selling some of their slaves to outsiders, but always in secret.

"Uh, sir?" Roger interrupted, "what if a kid isn't good for making into a slave? What if you kidnap a boy and he doesn't work out?"

Roger was thinking of a couple of slave boys in the complex who were really bad discipline problems. They just couldn't act, y'know, submissive the way the men in the indoctrination center taught you to be. A good slave boy was 'servile', and didn't talk back or giggle or stuff like that. You were supposed to take your slavery seriously because it was important for clients to have good sex with little boys at the comfort complexes, the kind of sex that helped a client to feel strong and powerful and dominant over the helpless young animals it was okay to hurt and humiliate the way men (and lots of ladies) liked to do.

In a bunch of the sex games that Roger had played with his friends when he'd been a real boy, Roger had really liked to pretend that he was the Master, doing sex-torture to another kid, even playing games where they combined naked sexy stuff with human sacrifice like what they showed in the history vids about Aztecs and olden times like that.

Jeez, sexiness that killed a kid. Almost as scary as those horror movies, and kinda better because in the horror movies it was only teenagers and grown-ups who got chopped up and stuff.

How come they never showed kids in those movies getting cut up with chainsaws or eaten by werewolves? Sure, little boys or little girls (especially girls, and wasn't that just too darned unfair?) sometimes got their clothes ripped off, and they were always threatened by the monsters, but that was only to jack up the tension. You'd figure that at least some of the time, the kid characters would get killed, right?

But playing the Master in those sex games had given Roger a pretty good idea of what his clients liked about doing the sex to slave boys, and it wasn't really hard for him to pretend for them.

Heck, long before they'd slaved him, Roger had been pretending to be a naked, helpless slave boy – even tied up and all – in those sweaty games with other boys in his old neighborhood. The idea of a kid getting made to do slave sex was just plain cool, in a sick kinda way.

All their imaginings hadn't even come close to how bad it was to be a slave for real, of course. Roger shuddered with remembered fear, thinking about what the men had done to him in the indoctrination center, the cruelty that had kept getting worse and worse and worse before they'd finally figured Roger was 'servile' enough to be put into the box for shipment to Hadleyville.

Then, of course, Roger's own sex feelings almost always got so strong that it kinda stopped being pretend with the clients, and got awfully (sometimes scarily) real. Roger had more than once been afraid that he really was going to die, either from the way the clients were hurting him, or the way the orgasms were going through him over and over until Roger was convinced that nobody could possibly live through it.

But what if a boy just plain wasn't good for being a sex slave? Let's say that the DMs at the indoctrination center worked that new-made slave boy through the things that made him good for being a sex slave (like a kid had any choice about what they did to you during indoctrination!), but once you got him in a regular comfort complex – like the two boys Roger was thinking about – he got stubborn and wouldn't obey.

Not all the time, but again and again. The DMs had been punishing each of those two boys pretty bad, both to make them behave better and as examples for the other slaves.

A few days before Mr. Chriswell had come to Hadleyville, 5-5-2-9 (a pale, brown-haired eleven-year-old who'd been slaved last winter, months before Roger had been taken away by the court) got crucified through the morning and the afternoon sessions.

That's what they called it, even though they didn't use nails like in the pictures and stuff. Roger learned that three of the DMs had put the sobbing, struggling boy up on a post just alongside the DM's desk in the pick-up area, with his arms stretched out and his wrists tied to the crossbar. There, every client and every slave got to see him like that, aching and trying to balance on the little step under his toes in order to keep himself from sinking all the way down on the big grown-up-sized artificial penis that was fitted to the upright so that it went up inside the boy's bottom.

And Roger had used to think that getting stood in the corner at school was the worst kind of 'in front of everybody' punishment that could happen to a guy.

One of Roger's clients that day had waited until they were together in the sex room before he'd explained that the wide strap around 5-5-2-9's chest was actually there to keep the kid from dying, taking most of the boy's weight for him. If the DMs had just let the slave boy hang there from where his arms were tied, pretty soon 5-5-2-9 would have so much trouble breathing that he'd just pass out, and then he'd quit breathing and that'd be all she wrote.

That client had been really turned on by the sight of an eleven-year-old boy being punished like that. When Roger had come out of the door next to the DM's desk, the client had been right next to 5-5-2-9 where the boy slave had been hanging, just totally naked on the cross, sweaty and aching and crying with the hurt and the humiliation. The kid was stuck up there high enough that a grown man had to look a little bit up at the boy's face, and the client had been playing and squeezing and twisting all slow and cruel and mean on the slave boy's penis and testicles to make the kid shudder and whimper and plead with his tormentor to stop, please stop, oh-god-oh-god-oh-god!

Of course, the sex that the client had done to Roger had been awfully rough, with beating and arm-twisting and all the rest of that stuff, leaving Roger sore all over by the time the man was done with him.

And even though Roger had spent most of that session crying and struggling and begging the man to please not hurt him so much, it had been gosh-darn awful sexy for Roger, too, with orgasm feelings again and again and again while the client had been doing those bad things to him.

Roger figured that after getting crucified, 5-5-2-9 ought to be properly broken for being a good sex slave, right? If not, 5-5-2-9 was probably going to get boxed up and shipped out to someplace else.

Maybe someplace where they'd take the kid apart for his organs, and there wouldn't even be a filthy animal with that number anymore.

Was that what 5-5-2-9 wanted? Roger thought about the look in the slave boy's eyes when Roger had seen the kid, hanging there on the cross, everybody (except Roger, it seemed) knowing that it wouldn't take much more of the torture to make him die. Did the boy who used to be real, the slave numbered 5-5-2-9, did he not want to live anymore?

Well, maybe. Roger thought back on his first days in the indoctrination center, and how scared he had been. Had Roger really wanted to just die and get it over with?

Remembering, Roger shook his head just a teensy bit. No, not really. Ever since those days, in fact, Roger had realized that he wanted to live, to go on living, because no matter how bad it was to see and hear and feel and think all the things that made him a slave boy, the feelings he had were strong, stronger maybe than the feelings Roger had experienced when he was just a regular kid going to school and playing with his friends.

Scary and hurtful and even sickening, it was all better than being just 3; nothing.

And when Roger thought back on what it had been like to live with his mom, going to school and playing with stupid toys and not even knowing what it was like to touch a grown-up man's big, hard penis, and smell it and taste it and feel it pushing into your bottom, so strong, so thick, so incredibly huge as it filled you up until you almost couldn't breathe for the size of it 3;

Well, maybe before he'd been made a slave boy, Roger had really been just 3; nothing.

What did the Masters in Mr. Chriswell's organization do to make a regular boy (who might be bad, like 5-5-2-9) into a slave who was good for the kinds of sex things that grown-up men liked to do?

And what kinds of sex did the men in Mr. Chriswell's organization like to do that they couldn't do to slave boys in a comfort complex?

"I've never met a boy who could not be enslaved," said Mr. Chriswell. "There has never been any such boy. Not in all the history of our group."

Roger explained about 5-5-2-9, and about the other kid, 1-0-3-8, who'd gotten slaved in February sometime, and was eleven years old, too. They were both nice-looking boys. 5-5-2-9 even had a pretty good-sized dickie for a kid on the no-grow shots. Of course, his testicles wouldn't ever start getting bigger and 'dropping' down loose in their pouch because as a slaveboy he wouldn't be allowed to grow up, and that was a shame, because Roger was pretty sure that a grown-up 5-5-2-9 would've been really impressive in the penis department.

"1-0-3-8 is kinda small for his age, like me," Roger said. "But he's still bigger than I am, of course. And he's not scared all the time, the way I am." Roger frowned, pressing his lips together. "I'm not very 3; brave."

Mr. Chriswell grunted and Roger felt the man's arm around his shoulders give a squeeze. "It's this Free Citizens' Militia to blame," said the man. "Any boy who's old enough to begin the training is at risk of getting false ideas." Mr. Chriswell smiled, looking into Roger's eyes. "Although we've found that boys who've had more than a year or two of Militia experience generally make very good slaves. They learn habits of discipline and respect for masterly authority."

Roger perked up at that. "So 5-5-2-9 and 1-0-3-8 could get made into okay slave boys at your place?" Roger thought for a second, looking at the spread-out collar guts on the table, keeping his voice low. "D-do you think you could make me a good slave boy?"

Roger looked up again. "I mean, even now, after I'm kinda spoiled by getting slaved and all the stuff they've done to me here?"

Mr. Chriswell paused for just a few second before responding. "Of course," he said, absolute certainty in his voice. "I would prefer to have you naïve from the moment of capture," he continued.

"Our particular 3; organization 3; has never attempted to salvage Authority slaves." The man shrugged. "There's never been any shortage of truly virginal boys, you know. But we have alliances with other 3; organizations 3; whose rules are less strict than our own, and to them we relegate the unacceptably 'experienced' younglings who fall into our hands. There have been difficult cases which we've consigned to our colleagues." A frown. "Even the worst of them can be used."

"You mean I, I couldn't be your slave, sir?" Roger felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Mr. Chriswell frowned. "It would be unprecedented." At the look of puzzlement on the boy's face, he clarified: "It's something we've never done before."

"But you could try, couldn't you, sir?"

The man grimaced. "Boy, you are the most un-slave-like slave boy I think I've ever met." He shifted Roger on his thigh, and Roger noticed that neither of them had a stiffie any more. "You want me to own you? Child, I haven't even used you." Mr. Chriswell snorted. "I may not fuck you at all! I came here wanting nothing more than accommodations for the night. Do you understand that?"

Helplessly, Roger nodded, muttering something not even he himself could make out.

"What did you say, boy?" Mr. Chriswell's voice was stern, and Roger's eyes were fixed on the man's opposite knee.

"I, I said that you shouldn't use bad words." Roger glanced up at the man's face from under lowered brows. "You're not like that, sir. You're better than that."

"Oh?" Mr. Chriswell's smile was sardonic as he shifted Roger a little. "How do you know I'm not like that?"

Roger blushed just a bit, shrugged, but wouldn't meet the man's eyes. "I dunno, sir. You just 3;" Then he did look up. "You're not like the other clients. The ones who say bad things. The ones who're mean to us slave boys. I can tell."

Mr. Chriswell shook his head, no change in his smile. "Let it please you to think that way. But it's not true." His fingertips caressed the boy's face again, brushing over Roger's nostrils and then his lips. "The words mean nothing, one way or the other. Cruelty is in the heart, and I have been cruel to little ones like you."

"'Cause you had to?" Roger asked. "F-for the sex?"

The man nodded. "Yes, boy. Always for the sex. Sex as a sacrament, as a connection to bring the slave into thrall, to bind him in dedication, and to fulfill him in his purpose. Cruel, always cruel. Do you understand that?"

Roger didn't, not really, but he wanted to nod as if he did. He was pretty sure that it'd please Mr. Chriswell if he did, but he also didn't want to lie to this man. He liked Mr. Chriswell, and there was something about all this that was really serious.

But Roger was only eight years old, and this kind of stuff had never gotten talked about in school or at home on any of the vids, even here in the comfort complex, where they didn't teach a slave boy about anything but the sex.

Roger felt so doggone dumb! There was so much that he needed to know, and he couldn't even guess at how to learn it.

"You're gonna have to teach me, sir," he said at last.

Mr. Chriswell chuckled again and Roger felt the arm around him hug him a little. "Teach you what, boy? About cruelty? I know how little time you've spent in the Authority's hands, but it's more than enough for you to have learned about that. Haven't they been cruel enough to you?"

Roger thought about Mr. Cowper and 1-4-3-7. As a DM, Mr. Cowper was really nice to the other slaves. The older Discipline Masters had to remind Mr. Cowper to be stricter with Roger and the rest, and you could tell that Mr. Cowper wasn't the kind of real person who thought slaves were just filth to be used. He treated the servitors politely (saying "please" and "would you" and stuff like that instead of just going "Do it, scum!"), and he was gentle with the sex slaves, even with the grown-up men and women slaves. Roger knew for sure that Mr. Cowper didn't like those grown-up slaves for the sex, right?

You could see that all the slaves in the complex had taken a liking to Mr. Cowper, though, and they were trying to help Alan learn his job and make him look good.

But Mr. Cowper really enjoyed hurting Jimmy in all the ways that a slaveboy could get hurt for the sex.

And 1-4-3-7 liked having Mr. Cowper doing that stuff to him. You could tell. Jimmy was happier than Roger had ever seen him, even when the kid was stuck in an abstinence or shackled with real chains (the kind a slave couldn't unfasten himself) or getting tortured, as long as it was being done by the teenager who used to be his neighbor back when Jimmy had been a real boy. What the heck?

"I think it's the way the cruel stuff happens, sir."

Roger hadn't talked this much with a client before, and he wondered why Mr. Chriswell wasn't just ordering him to shut up. But the look in the grown-up's eyes didn't tell Roger that he ought to shut up, right? Roger swallowed hard and went on.

"Doing the sex to a guy like me – I mean the real sex, with a grown-up's penis in my bottom – has got to hurt a boy." Roger glanced at Mr. Chriswell's dickie, which still hadn't gotten stiff, even though they were talking about sex. Roger's own dickie wasn't all the way hard, but it was definitely poking out some. Then the boy looked back up at his client's face.

"Everybody knows that, sir. Heck, us guys – I mean, the kids in my class at school – all of us used to talk about big grown-up dickies and how much they had to hurt when they're used on kids our size. Most of us knew about stuff going up inside our bottoms because of doctor visits, and we knew about slave sex." He paused. "I mean, we're boys. You know how it is, don't you, sir?"

Mr. Chriswell's smile was more open, and the man nodded. "Yes, I know. Lots and lots of speculation."

"Sir?"

"Wondering about it," the man clarified. "Not knowing exactly what it involves, but making guesses."

"Yes, sir!" Roger flashed a grin, nodded thanks. "The older guys in my neighborhood, the teenagers, they got to go to the comfort complex back home, and even though they weren't supposed to hang around with us younger kids, some of us would hear them talking about stuff, about how the slave boys got used for the sex in that place, how those slaves had to go naked all the time, and the chains and the way the visitors could beat them and do really awful things to them."

Roger was suddenly aware of himself, who he was now, instead of who he had been.

"Th-the way grown-us do bad things to us slave boys in this place."

Gently, Mr. Chriswell asked: "Am I doing bad things to you, boy?"

"No, sir," Roger admitted, a little bit reluctantly. "But you could, if you wanted to. And I wouldn't be allowed to say 'no', or fight back, or try to get away from you. Anything you wanted, no matter how much you hurt me."

Of course, thinking about that made Roger's dickie become a stiffie, and he felt himself blushing again. Doggone it!

"But what makes you think Master wants to?"

The voice came from right behind Roger, making him jump in startlement, and he would've fallen off Mr. Chriswell's knee if the man hadn't kept hold of him. It was Julia, who'd gotten up quietly and snuck up behind the boy.

His heart pounding, Roger looked wide-eyed at the slave girl, then glowered. No fair!

"Master?" continued the girl, "may I please finish the rest of my lunch?"

Mr. Chriswell smiled at her, obviously sharing in the joke on the slave boy who was their 'host'.

"Of course." The man regarded Roger. "Would you like to finish your portion, too?"

After an instant of hesitation, Roger realized that if he wasn't exactly hungry, he could eat. And that shepherd's pie 3;

"Yes, sir. Th-thank you, sir."

Julia confidently set Roger's tray on the side of the table opposite the collar guts spread out before Mr. Chriswell, and shifted her own to her owner's right, seating herself carefully on the edge of the chair there. Roger settled himself before his tray and lifted the lid, delighted to find that the dish half-full of beef and vegetables with its crust of toasted mashed potatoes was still warm.

As before, Roger watched Julia, not-so-surreptitiously trying to copy her dining technique, admiring her poise. All his life, Roger had been aware of the ways in which girls always seemed to be smarter than boys, more graceful, more comfortable around the grown-ups, almost as if a girl kinda started out in life understanding the grown-up world better than boys could.

Besides, Julia had been born a slave, and had lived in slavery all her life. By comparison, Roger was a total n00b.

No fair!

When Roger paused for a moment, distracted by what Mr. Chriswell was doing with a part of the heavy collar casing, he caught Julia smiling at him.

"He does that with my collar all the time," the girl said. "Master calls it 'tinkering'." She shot an affectionate glance at her owner, who smiled in return, but put his attention back on the component with which he was working.

"Master's family practically invented the slave collar," Julia continued, between dainty forkfuls of her shepherd's pie. She sipped her milk. "And they were founders of the order, so they were slavemasters long before the Slave Authority ever existed."

"We were among the founders of our order," Mr. Chriswell corrected, not even looking up. "And for a breeder slut who has never yet set foot within the chambers of the order – and never will! – you take an inordinate pride in our family's participation."

Roger blinked at that word, 'family', then realized that it really was how Mr. Chriswell and Julia thought about each other. Family. Not just an owner and a slave girl the man could just use as he pleased, but a grown-up and a kid who belonged to each other, the way Roger had used to belong to his mom.

Then the boy knew he was wrong. His mom had never been like that about Roger, the way Mr. Chriswell was about Julia. And had Roger ever been that way about his mom? Had Roger even wanted to be that way about his mother? Family?

Maybe when he'd been little, when Roger had been a cute little kid totally dependent upon his mom for everything, but once he'd started school – heck, once he'd learned how to make his own sandwiches for lunch – his mom had started losing interest in him, and Roger had known that he was nothing but a nuisance to her.

Julia was growing up to make Mr. Chriswell's sons for him. She was his own personal breeder slut, a specially made girl, who already knew the reason she was alive, and she was proud to be Mr. Chriswell's slave. She was special because of her Master, better for her purpose than anybody else in the whole world, treasured so highly that her owner wouldn't even let her be put in a motel slave cage instead of sleeping in the same room with him.

Roger remembered the one time his mom had taken him on a long trip to visit her great-aunt, who had been the only one of her relatives Roger had ever known about. He'd just turned seven, and Tantie always visited Roger's mom before. The old lady had been sick, and had to be put in a nursing home, so when Roger's mom had gotten them there, they'd checked in at a motel, and the clerk had put a little low cot in the room for Roger to sleep on.

The boy had thought that was pretty cool. A kid-sized bed, only a little bit up off the floor, kinda like you could put in a tent when you were camping out.

The clerk had grinned at him when Roger had settled on the cot and lay back to try it out.

"You could put him in a slave cage, y'know."

Roger's mom had just blinked at that, her expression puzzled.

"There's a charge for the cot," the clerk had explained. "But a night in a slave cage comes with the room. It's the law. Just strip his clothes off and I'll tuck him away for you."

Roger had sat up a little at that. From almost since he could remember, he'd been playing 'slave' games with the older kids in the neighborhood, and though it scared him a little, the idea of being inside a real slave cage – all bare-naked and everything! – was exciting. This trip had already been something of an adventure. But the other guys would freak if he could tell them about being locked up like a slave boy!

His mom had made a frown. Looking at the clerk, she'd reached up to almost touch her neck. "But the collar," she'd said, "and the markings 3;"

The clerk had glanced at Roger, grinning, then back at the boy's mother. "Oh, we've got fake collars. And decals for the slave marks. They'll make him look just like the real thing."

Her frown had hardened. "That's illegal!"

The clerk had laughed. "It's harmless. Besides, the slave cops in this county know about it. Sure, they run checks on our guests' property sometimes, but we slip 'em the wink and a nod and they just move right along. We've even got slave rations, standard government issue. There are a few parents – our regulars – who leave their kids in our cages whenever they're off for a week-end at the casinos. We even exercise 'em along with the legitimate slaves. Elliptical machine and treadmill and a resistance set-up for their upper bodies. And a couple of quirts to make sure they sweat. Good discipline for a free little fellow like this one, I tell ya."

The man had turned back to Roger. "What d'you say, big guy? We've already got two honest-to-goodness slave boys in the cages back of the office. You could spend the night right alongside them, pretending to be one of them. Find out what it's like."

Roger had looked to his mom, half-frightened, half-eager. He could tell that she was thinking about it, but then she'd sighed and shaken her head.

"No," she'd said at last. "I have to take him with me to the nursing home this evening. She wants to see him, and we'll be there for hours. In the morning, I've got to make an early start. Oh, would you set a 5 AM wake-up call for me at the front desk?"

"Sure," the clerk had said. Again, he'd smiled at Roger. "Sorry, kid! Maybe next time."

The visit to the nursing home had been boring, even though his mom's great-aunt had been an awfully nice lady. Roger had fallen asleep in her room's easy chair, watching a vid, while the two ladies had been talking, and he hardly remembered being driven back to the motel to get into that neat little cot for the rest of the night.

His mom's great-aunt had gotten better, and she'd been able to come and visit after that, so Roger had never gotten the chance to go back and stay in that motel again.

But now Roger knew what it was like to be locked in a slave cage for real, and while it wasn't quite as terrifying as he'd thought that 'for real' would be, it wasn't anything that Mr. Chriswell wanted to have happen to Julia.

Roger and Julia finished what was left of their lunches without haste but in short order, and the boy drank down his plain milk with a sense of satisfaction. It really wasn't so bad when they didn't make you have it in the school cafeteria every doggone day. Julia liked to talk while she was eating, what Roger's mom had used to call 'chit-chat', and mostly what she liked to talk about was her Master. Glancing over at Mr. Chriswell, Roger could see that the grown-up didn't seem to be paying much attention. Julia had had to nudge the man once to ask Mr. Chriswell a question, which her owner had answered absently before going back to what he'd been doing with some teensy tools and parts he'd taken out the stuff he'd brought along with him.

When Julia got up to clear away the trays, Roger got a sudden attack of manners. He headed for the vidscreen, saw that it was still in terminal mode, and got the refectory menu again. He picked out 'service' again. The screen flashed back a 'received' message, and the boy turned back to help Julia stack the covered trays on the floor near where the sliding panel would open up at the back of the sex room.

The girl stepped into the little bathroom and sat on the toilet to empty her bladder, utterly without shyness, daintily using a wipe to clean her smooth cunny. The little chastity padlock and the rings piercing the outer lips of her cunny didn't seem to interfere the way a boy's abstinence would. Then she got up and politely put the seat up for Roger, waiting by the commode for him to step up and stand before it. Her left arm around his waist, she matter-of-factly took the boy's stiffie between her thumb and fingertips and angled it down at the bowl.

Roger had had clients do this to him, of course. Lots of them did 'pissing' games with their sex slaves, and there was something about controlling another guy while he pee'd that even regular boys liked. But Roger wasn't tied up or anything. He could hold his own dickie. He put his hand on Julia's smooth shoulder and leaned close to whisper:

"You don't gotta do this for me."

She smiled. She kept her own voice low. "It's okay. I like doing it. You're pretty!"

Roger pressed his lips together, shrugged just a teensy bit, and concentrated on getting his pee started. He really did have to go again, so it wasn't too difficult, but he didn't breathe easy until the flow had gotten started properly. Julia's fingers were confident on the shaft of Roger's penis, moving it gently to describe circles in the toilet bowl, entertained by the way you could use a boy's dickie to do that.

Shuddering, Roger finished the final spurts of urine, and went up on tiptoe as Julia bent over to 'milk' the underside of his dickie, wringing out the last drops before blotting the tip of it with the same wipe she'd used on her own cunny. She turned her head to grin up at him and then kissed Roger's chest, her kisses working down the boy's belly until she took his stiffie into her mouth to taste him, and automatically Roger took her head in his hands, letting her push him away from the toilet as she got down on her knees to get a proper stance for sucking him, her hands sliding around to hold Roger by the bottom cheeks.

When he'd been a real boy, Roger had been awfully self-conscious about the fact that he had such a small penis. It was supposed to be an okay size for a kid his age (and the smallest boy in his class, doggone it!), but now that he was a slave and they were going to keep him small so that grown-ups would like him for the sex, Roger knew that his dickie was never, ever going to get much bigger, and like his little testicles – almost always drawn up snug against his body – his boy-parts would never be good for anything except as something the grown-ups could use to sex-torture him.

But it also worked just fine when somebody would use it to make him feel good, of course.

Back home, like everyplace in America, boys and girls were kept strictly apart by the grown-ups after they'd started Kindergarten. Roger hadn't realized how thoroughly that had been managed until he'd gotten slaved, and he'd had those 'practice' sessions in the indoctrination place with Mistress Annalise.

The grown-ups had never given the boys and girls in Roger's neighborhood or school or town even the least little bit of a chance to mess around with members of the opposite sex.

Oh, boys got lots of 'free play' time, unsupervised independence to explore the woods and fields and other outside spaces all over their town. Lots of that time was spent doing sex stuff together, and that included anything that didn't involve bullying or actually did a guy any damage. There were spanking games and stuff where guys got tied up for pretend 'whippings', but if anybody went home with marks on him, the parents went absolutely ballistic, so you had to be careful, okay?

But that was just like any other kinds of games boys played. Roger didn't know exactly what the girls did, but they had places set aside just for them, where boys weren't allowed. Besides, girls didn't get the no-grow shots, and boys sure did.

Real early on, girls your own age started getting taller and stronger than boys were. So who wanted to hang around with girls? You were totally outclassed.

The few girls who'd done sex stuff to him – Mistress Annalise, the two girl sex slaves here at the comfort complex, and now Julia – had each seemed to like Roger's dickie all right. Mistress Annalise had been the only one who hadn't had any experience with grown-up penis sizes, and she'd said that Roger's dickie was 'cute'.

Well, 'cute' is better than ridiculously too small, isn't it?

Julia obviously knew about boy-dickies. She was sucking Roger's penis pretty much the same way a boy would, if that guy was being friendly instead of competitive.

Lots of Roger's playmates back when he'd been a real human being had done the sucking like it was a contest, to make the other guy have a tickle-bone as fast as you could, proving that you were better at it than he was.

But if you really liked the guy you were sucking, you did it at just the right speed, not too slow, not too fast, making sure that the boy was really enjoying it.

That was easy if your friend was the kind of boy who made a lot of noise when somebody was making the good feelings in him, and Roger figured that there were more people like that – the ones who groaned and moaned, or said stuff like 'Yeah, that way! Faster! Ooh!' (or even cursed, using the f-bomb and other really bad words!) – than there were of Roger's own kind. That was sure true of most grown-ups in Roger's experience, teenagers and men and ladies.

Roger had always been really quiet when getting his good feelings, kind of gasping or at most keeping it down to a choked whimper when somebody was making him tickle-bone. That had been because of his mom, who had caught him a couple of times doing masturbation, and she'd yelled and whupped him pretty good.

So you got good at not letting her know you were doing it. Lots of Roger's friends had had the same kind of problems with their parents, so even when they slept over at each other's houses, the sex stuff got done quietly.

Now, Roger was even pretty quiet when the clients or the DMs hurt him really bad in the penis-shoving and the sex torture, not just by habit but mostly because he was ashamed about not taking it like a big boy.

Big boys aren't supposed to cry, but Roger had long since figured out that you couldn't control crying when you were being hurt more than you could handle. The sounds you made – especially the begging and promises to be good next time – didn't do you any good when grown-ups were hurting you because hurting a little kid gave them sexy feelings, and not because you'd actually been bad or stuff like that.

Sometimes they made it so bad that you just had to beg for them to stop, but Roger had already come to the conclusion that it was best to keep it in, if you could. Pleading for mercy just made some grown-ups hurt you more. Yeesh.

Feeling Julia's lips and tongue working on his dickie, watching her head moving back and forth, her face bumping warm against his tummy, the breath from her nose tickling him a little, Roger knew that this slave girl really liked him, and that made Roger have friendly feelings – not just sexy feelings – about the pretty little slut.

Her short hair made Julia look like a boy (especially if you couldn't see her cunny), and that made it even more sexy for Roger. Not really thinking about it, he put his hands on her head, which was something he'd been taught not to do when a client was sucking your penis like this, because a slave boy isn't supposed to show 'dominance'.

But Julia didn't seem to mind, and Roger wasn't trying to control her sucking, of course. He just felt grateful to the girl for doing something nice to him, and his hands were light on her scalp, kind of playing with her hair, tickling at her ears, almost petting her as she tasted his penis so nice.

When he'd been a real boy, and doing sex stuff with his friends, Roger had thought that a tickle-bone was the end of the good feelings, when your dickie-sensations got to be so much that you just had to quit rubbing your penis, or make the other guy quit sucking you or playing with your dickie. Heck, you couldn't even touch it for a couple of minutes afterwards.

But once he'd gotten slaved, Roger had learned that a little boy's orgasms – real orgasms – could be made super-powerful by people who knew how to do it.

Mostly, the grown-ups made a slave boy orgasm by doing your dickie on the outside while they were using the sex parts on your inside, with a vibrator or a plug or their fingers or a big, thick grown-up penis. Or just on your inside without even touching your dickie at all.

When they did that, the good feelings came from so deep down inside you that you felt like you were gonna die!

Jeez, no wonder it was against the law for grown-ups to do sex to real boys. Get used to those feelings, and who'd ever want to just do your penis inside a lady's twat? Awful as it was to be a sex slave, Roger had to admit that whenever he knew that he was going to have a grown-up man doing slave sex to him, it made him feel kinda sick and scared and dizzy and eager to get started.

Like watching one of those roller coaster rides he'd never been allowed to get on because he'd always been too little.

And now Roger had to ride the big penis of any grown-up man who came to this place and took him to a sex room like this one, feeling it spreading him open and sliding in and out of his aching, burning bottom, the hardness getting shoved further and further up inside his naked body, opening him up and filling him with proof that Roger wasn't a real boy anymore, but just an animal who deserved to be used for a man's pleasure!

That's when Roger had his orgasm, of course, shuddering in anguished delight as Julia suckled him all the way to the good feelings, making him teeter on his toes in the puppet-dance of a slave boy being used by someone who knows just how to do it.

With sparkly lights going off in his brain, Roger didn't try to keep standing when Julia pulled him down to kneel on the floor of the little bathroom and then gathered him into a hug, kissing him and murmuring 'Good boy!' and 'Wasn't that nice?' and 'You're so pretty!'

"Th-thank you, Mistress," he babbled, falling back on his memories of Annalise and the indoctrination center, and that made Julia giggle.

"I'm not a Mistress, boy!" she whispered. "Just a slut who likes how you taste."

That made Roger smile a little, and he hugged Julia back. It was the first time in his life that Roger had ever thought of a girl the way he'd used to think of his friends back home, like a regular person. "You're nicer than any of the slave girls we've got here," he said in a low voice.

"Well, I'm special," Julia replied with a grin. She clambered to her feet and reached down to haul Roger up beside her again. "Master had me made that way!"

The sliding door chose that moment to open, and Roger moved quickly to the stacked trays, handing them one at a time to the grown-up servitor – one of the women slaves, this time, but not a sex slave – who appeared unsmiling in the doorway. She took each without comment and put it on her cart, and then looked at the cold box near the table, saying nothing but kind of asking about it with her eyebrows. Roger hesitated, then shook his head. Mr. Chriswell hadn't touched his dessert yet, and though Roger had never had a client eating lunch or dinner in a sex room, even the regular rooms had little refrigerators with drinks and stuff that the clients could have. The servitor woman just shrugged, stepped back, and slid the door shut.

When he turned away, Roger saw Julia standing by her Master's left elbow, smiling at the man who was ignoring her. Approaching on the opposite side, Roger saw that Mr. Chriswell was using the camera and screen on his pad as a kind of magnifying glass, holding it over the little collar parts on the tabletop to make them seem bigger. The handsome grown-up was frowning.

"Did I say a generation out of date?" the man muttered. He glanced at Roger, frowning, then turned to shake his head just slightly at Julia. "I think that some of these bits came out of Tesla's spare parts bin."

She grinned at that, and put one arm around her owner's shoulders to give him a quick hug. If it was a joke, Roger didn't get it, and that made him feel stupid. As usual.

"Would you like me to make you coffee, Master?" Julia tilted her head just a little, and Roger sensed that she was trying to get him to quit 'tinkering' and relax.

Mr. Chriswell was about to say 'No', but hesitated, looked at the naked slut's pretty face, sighed, and nodded. "And I suppose you want your dessert."

"Master?" Julia had the kind of look in her eye that even Roger knew wasn't serious. Sure she wanted her dessert. Roger knew that this 'coffee' bit was her hint about that. A 'family' kind of thing, and realizing that made Roger feel a kind of an ache down deep inside himself, almost like when somebody punched him in the belly or something.

He'd had 'family' stuff with his mom, hadn't he? So how come he couldn't remember any of it?

The parts of Roger's collar were laid out on the tabletop in what the boy suddenly understood – for no particular reason; he just saw it that way – was a kind of a pattern, one that had to do with what the parts did, and how they went together inside the heavy steel casing. It was as if Roger could see the pieces going together, fitting next to each other and into each other, and he understood how it was that Mr. Chriswell could take things like this apart and put it back together so it could work. Darn! Mr. Chriswell was smart to do this kind of stuff.

There was actually a kind of little coffee pot on the bar, just over the refrigerator, and Julia was proving that she knew how to use it. The smell of coffee made Roger's nose wrinkle. He knew how to make it, but he'd never liked it, and he still couldn't figure out why grown-ups drank it. Sometimes without even any sweetener!

He watched Julia pour her Master a cup of the stuff, and then she carefully added a little of the milk she'd saved from her own dinner, a thoughtfulness that Roger recognized as one more proof that the pretty little breeder slut really did love her owner. When she brought it to him, Mr. Chriswell put the cup on the tabletop, took Julia's hand in his own, and kissed her knuckles with a small smile of thanks that made the girl smile in return and kinda wriggle just a little.

The dessert cups were different kinds of frozen fruit slushes, all tart and sweet and unlike anything Roger had tasted since he'd been slaved, so he really had to be careful copying Julia and Mr. Chriswell, who both ate like they were used to these kinds of treats all the time. Stuff like this sure didn't come with the slave rations!

But both Mr. Chriswell and his slave girl seemed to understand how Roger really loved the taste of these goodies, and each of them gave him the last bits of their portions. Mr. Chriswell had something called 'teaberry', and Julia's was 'key lime' and really sour. For his own, Roger had to ask the man what 'nectarine' was, and why it tasted so much like peaches.

There were other dessert cups in the cooler because the refectory servitors had very nicely packed extras, and though Roger was hoping to try some – or all! – of the rest, he knew enough not to ask. Besides, after so long without these kinds of treats, Roger wasn't sure that he wouldn't get sick or something.

Studying the last of the 'teaberry' slush in the cup Mr. Chriswell had handed him, Roger thought really hard, not looking up.

If anybody in the world could help 5-5-2-9 and 1-0-3-8 become good slave boys – really proper slave boys, even if the DMs here couldn't do the job – it was somebody like Mr. Chriswell. Mr. Chriswell was smart. He was rich, and he was part of an organization, and he was a good Master himself. Just look at Julia.

And maybe Mr. Chriswell could do it for Roger, too.

Chapter 18

There were slave laws in almost every country, and governments set things up so a private owner could buy slaves from anywhere and sell his property to anybody. In America, though, if some grown-up got made a government slave – like the servitors working in the conditioning centers, the farm laborers, or the sex slaves in a comfort complex – that slave almost never got sent out of the country.

Government slavery was what the grown-ups called 'enlightened penal servitude', all legal and regulated and the way things were supposed to be. Not like the bad stuff that happened in foreign countries where almost nobody spoke English.

Only if a slave was privately owned could he get taken where the government didn't keep track of him, and Roger had heard stories about how rich guys overseas would buy American kids – and even grown-up women – to use as sex slaves.

Now, that was legal. If you were a 'forever' slave – what they called a 'lifetime indenture' – the government could sell you to anybody who could get the permissions and had the money. A lot of money, everybody knew. Then your owner could take you anywhere he wanted, and you could get sold to somebody else once you got there.

But if you got kidnapped and they took you out of the country, they could claim that you were a slave, and get the government guys in another country to make up the papers and all the rest of it so that you became a slave over there. And then you were stuck. Everybody talked about how that had happened to real kids who had families and weren't ever supposed to be slaved. Pretty horrible.

There was even a show on the vids about brave Slave Authority policemen who chased after the guys who 'trafficked' in the illegal slave trade. They rescued real kids and ladies who got slaved against the law, or rescued regular slaves from owners who really seriously permanently hurt them, or neglected them almost to death, making sure that the Slave Laws were properly obeyed.

If you were a kid and your folks had the vid on 'nanny' lock-out, of course, you never actually got to see the parts of the show where people were pretending to do the sex and the abuse to the slaves, but Roger had heard that the scenes where that stuff happened were pretty cool, in a scary way. They used honest-to-gosh slave boys and girls for those 'explicit' parts, so they could have the sex and the hurting acted out without corrupting the morals of real kids.

The vid industry had lots of child actors who were slaves. You could keep them looking little and cute for, like, forever, so you could see a pretty little girl who looked six years old but who had been doing parts for twenty years or so, and had gotten super-good at it. The Slave Authority had policemen at the vid studios who could take off the slave collars for the scenes those kids were in, and even though the children were sex slaves, they were allowed to wear clothes when they were acting, so unless you watched the credits part you couldn't tell for sure which kids acting in a vid were real and which were slaves. The vid makers even faked doing the sex to some of the real kids so you got fooled into believing that a part you thought was being played by a slave boy was actually getting done by a regular kid.

Roger had learned from Mr. Cowper that when 1-4-3-7 had gotten slaved – when he'd been just a regular boy named 'Jimmy' – the judge had planned to have Jimmy sold at one of the auctions where rich guys bought their own private slaves from the government, and Jimmy might even have been taken out of the country to some bad foreign place forever.

Jimmy would have cost some guy a lot of money at one of those auctions, Mr. Cowper had said, and Jimmy would have gone to his owner without getting taught how to be a proper slave boy at an indoctrination center, or even having the sex done to him before his owner got him home.

Most every private owner liked to be the first grown-up to do the sex to a slave kid, so a brand-new virgin slave was worth a lot more money. Roger was surprised when Julia had told him that nobody had ever done the sex to her in her cunny, and Mr. Chriswell had said that it was true.

In her bottom, sure. He'd asked Julia about that, and she hadn't been shy about it or anything. Girls were good for doing the sex in their bottoms, just like boys, and in the vids he had to watch, Roger had seen slave girls getting done that way. Both times when the clients had used Roger along with a girl slave in a foursome, the men had hurt each girl in her bottom with a penis. But each of those slave girls had gotten big dickies in her front parts, too. The men had made Roger watch them do it. They'd really liked making Roger watch.

It still kinda grossed Roger out just thinking about grown-up man doing sex in a girl's cunny. A grown-up lady's twat was sloppy and stretchy, which figured if it was the place that babies had to come out. A little girl's cunny was, well, little. Kinda delicate-looking.

Almost pretty, right? And without all that smell a grown-up twat always had.

Seeing a grown-up-size dickie shoved up into a girl's cunny was just plain wrong. Roger shook his head just thinking about it.

He considered Julia, who was kinda pretty all over. Julia had said that her cunny still had her whatchamacallit, the membrane thing that girls are born with in the opening. She hadn't gotten 'deflowered' yet, and wasn't it weird to talk that way about a girl's privates?

She was going to have Mr. Chriswell's babies because Mr. Chriswell wasn't married, and never wanted to get married, even though he wanted sons. If you could afford to buy your own girl slave like Julia, you could use her for that, and Julia would be especially good for baby-making (once she got grown up big enough) because all her genes had been picked for making the kinds of babies Mr. Chriswell wanted. Even though she was a 'construct' – which was all kinds of illegal – he'd gotten her registered as a regular slave, with a tattoo on her leg and a government slave collar and everything, so it would be just about impossible for a government man to know about it and take her away from him.

Roger didn't know for sure, but the way Julia had talked about it, if she got taken away as a 'construct', the government would just kill her. And burn her body. Not even harvested for transplants. Shuddery horrible.

But Mr. Chriswell didn't say anything more to Roger about the two slaveboys who were discipline problems at the Hadleyville comfort complex. Maybe the man couldn't, without some explaining, that was pretty sure.

To start with, the slave boys kept by Mr. Chriswell's organization weren't legal slaves. They weren't registered, and they didn't get the special tracking chips inside them and they didn't have the collars the government made you wear if you'd gotten slaved the way Roger had been. They looked just exactly like real boys.

So how did you keep them from running away? With something like those teensy invisible implant things Mr. Chriswell said he'd invented?

Well, no. Not yet. Mr. Chriswell said he'd been working on that, but the older men in the organization were what he called 'traditionalists'. Sort of a nicer way of saying 'fuddy-duddies'.

Some of the organizations – not Mr. Chriswell's – disguised their slaves to look just like real kids. You could see them walking around with their owners, wearing clothes and everything, and you'd never know that they were more than polite, obedient little boys or girls, just awfully shy and quiet around strangers, and Roger wondered why Mr. Chriswell hadn't done that with Julia so she could stay with him at a regular motel.

But Roger didn't ask about that. You could tell that Mr. Chriswell was kind of touchy about it. Julia was his personal slave, and it was obviously important to Mr. Chriswell that she stayed with him wherever he went, even though people knew that she was legally a sex slave, and that Mr. Chriswell owned her.

Like he'd thought before, Roger realized, Julia was really lucky. She had a grown-up who cared about her. A lot.

That made Roger wonder what it would be like to have one somebody who cared specially about him, and again he felt kinda achy when he thought about it.

The secret owners' organization that Mr. Chriswell belonged to would never let outsiders know that their hidden slave boys existed. When a boy got slaved by them – illegally, remember – the kid never went anywhere outside the places run by Mr. Chriswell's organization except secretly, from one special place to another. Hidden places out in the country or in the city, some of them even built underground, where the slave boys were kept for their masters.

The way Mr. Chriswell described it, once they'd slaved a boy, they made it just plain impossible for the kid to run away. It wasn't only because all the boys were kept like prisoners, but that the men in his secret organization had worked out ways to make a regular normal average boy want to be a slave, to belong to the men who mastered them and to be good for the special kinds of sex that these men liked to have with boys.

Roger wondered about that. The only slave kids Roger knew – himself included – had been taken away from their homes by the government, and they were forced to do the sex with grown-ups in a comfort center. They were stuck with being slaves. You didn't want that, did you?

But could a boy get so used to sex slavery that he'd want to stay a slave even when he could get away? Roger was sitting there in front of Mr. Chriswell, both of them bare-naked, with Roger's collar all spread out on the table, the two of them just like a regular grown-up and a regular kid, and Roger really liked the way Mr. Chriswell was looking at him and talking to him. And the way that the man had been holding him and touching him.

If Mr. Chriswell owned Roger, if Roger could belong to somebody like Mr. Chriswell – a handsome, strong, smart grown-up with nice muscles and a sexy big dickie – wouldn't being Mr. Chriswell's slave be better even than being a free kid back in Roger's old neighborhood?

"Sir," Roger asked, "do you own any slave boys like that? Secret slave boys?"

Mr. Chriswell nodded. "Two of them. One is a little older than you, the other nearing his fifteenth birthday." He smiled. "Though I keep them both small and undeveloped. The older boy is actually shorter than the younger one, and masses less, but I'm being pressed to allow him some growth."

It turned out that the men in Mr. Chriswell's organization liked their boy slaves for more than just the sex. The kids were taught all kinds of other stuff, including singing (they had a choir) and playing musical instruments and dancing. Mr. Chriswell's slaves were both especially good at dancing, and not just that ballet stuff. All of them did gymnastics and acrobatic things, too.

"I used to do singing in school," Roger volunteered. "We had chorus and glee club both."

"Oh?" Mr. Chriswell made an 'show me' gesture, and Roger glanced at Julia. For some reason, the thought of doing it in front of a girl – even a girl slave – made him feel shy. But Mr. Chriswell had explained earlier that Julia hadn't gotten much sleep the night before because she couldn't sleep in the car very well, and Roger thought about how she had looked when she'd been napping. So he stood up from his chair – closing his eyes so he couldn't see Julia or her owner – and sang a kind of a lullaby they'd taught him, very softly, even though Roger thought it was a little bit funny to sing a lullaby for two people who were both older than he was, because you'd figure it would be for a grown-up to sing like that to a little kid.

Well, Mr. Chriswell seemed to like it, because he smiled when Roger was done and had opened his eyes, and the man pulled Roger close to seat the boy on his knee again, giving him a hug while he kissed him in a not-sexy way that gave Roger some really sexy feelings. A glance at Julia told Roger that she'd liked it, too.

Mr. Chriswell explained that his older secret slave boy was especially good in what the man called 'combat arts', which wasn't just the kung-fu-type 'martial arts' but stuff the organization did with padded body armor and blunt weapons, as if you were pretending to be gladiators, only with judges and scoring points. Other men in the organization really liked how Mr. Chriswell's older slave did this stuff, and they wanted the kid to be let off the no-grow shots enough to get a bit bigger. That would let him compete with the stronger slave boys and maybe be part of the special midwinter ceremony they held every year.

"I haven't wanted to allow that," said Mr. Chriswell, "because in the midwinter games the slaves are given into the battle circle entirely naked, their only protection a small shield, called a buckler. Yes, the battle sticks are blunt, and padded, but they're heavy, and there are 3; risks. There's wagering by the members of the organization." Seeing Roger's blank look, the man said it differently.

"There's betting, on what happens in each contest, not just who wins but how the points are scored. And the greatest risk is that a Master can lose a slave boy entered in these contests. Forever.".

He frowned. "At least one boy is always lost every year. It's the tradition."

So the Masters bet their slave boys? Roger thought for an instant how bad it must be for a boy to be lost to another grown-up, to have a different Master. But that happened to regular slave boys who had private owners, didn't it? A slave doesn't have any choice about who owns him.

"Did you ever lose a slave boy that way, sir?"

Mr. Chriswell looked at Roger, his expression kinda grim. "Once. Two years before you were born. Brave and beautiful and agile, but it wasn't enough. He was overmatched in the circle, and the decision went against." The man sighed. "That's fate. But if I don't have to take such a risk again, I'd rather not."

Roger thought to himself that it was the boy taking the risk, wasn't it? But slaves weren't real people, and grown-ups didn't think of them as anything but property, right?

"What else do the slave boys do in your secret place, sir?"

Mr. Chriswell aimed a smile at Julia before turning back to Roger. "Chores. Cleaning, mending, helping in the kitchens. The young ones serve at banquets and other ceremonies. The older boys do that as well, but they also play important roles in teaching and training our newly-enslaved boys. Those who start to gain their adolescent growth – mostly in their twenties, with the treatments we've had until recently – they're promoted to senior slave status, and they take part in operating and maintaining all the equipment we use to keep the order running. They're vital to the building and rebuilding we do in all our facilities, strong and smart and loyal to the order in which they've lived almost all their lives."

"The ones who grow all the way up," said Julia, "become Servants of the order. Like the servitor slaves in the comfort complex here. They work everywhere, even outside the secret places." She grinned. "They have to wear clothes when the go 'into the world', and most of them hate it. I've met all the ones who run the breeder farm for the order, and they're nice. I've also met some of the little boys – your size – when they're brought out by the Masters to serve in the secret places where girls are allowed sometimes."

Mr. Chriswell chuckled. "In the history of our order, there have been Masters who had no male heirs to whom they could leave their interests. To maintain their families' continuation in the order, there have been a few – a very few – women entrusted with the knowledge of the order's existence and its nature so that their sons and nephews might be given the opportunity to qualify for Mastery. But Julia 3;" he looked at her with pride " 3;is the only female slave ever to have set foot in any of the outer holdings."

"Well," the girl corrected, "I'm the only one who's ever set foot there and walked away afterwards." She gave her owner a knowing look, and Roger caught sight of Mr. Chriswell shaking his head just slightly.

Roger thought about what Mr. Chriswell had told him. The sex slaves in a comfort complex weren't supposed to talk to each other, to help each other, to make friends. Every time you did something that way – like what Roger had done with Jimmy, slave boy 1-4-3-7, when they'd been left together in that sex room that one time – the DMs were supposed to punish you for it. A sex slave wasn't supposed to show 'initiative'.

A sex slave was just to get used.

But in Mr. Chriswell's 'order', the slave boys weren't for nothing but the sex. They were expected to help out, to learn important stuff about running the place, to take care of each other. It wouldn't be like having a real family, of course. But Roger had never had a real family, had he?

If a kid had to be a sex slave, being a slave in the 'order' would be better than what the clients and the DMs did to you in a comfort complex, wouldn't it?

Okay. But with the collars and the tracking chips and who knows what else, how could any government sex slave – like 5-5-2-9 and 1-0-3-8 – get out of a comfort complex to where the order could own them?

Gosh, how could Roger get out? The boy looked at Mr. Chriswell's face, thinking hard about how absolutely awful it would be after Mr. Chriswell left here, if the man couldn't make Roger his slave boy.

Or, worse, if Mr. Chriswell didn't want Roger to be his slave.

Mr. Chriswell eased Roger off his knee and stood up, stretching mightily. He then leaned over his pad, tapped it once or twice, and frowned.

"They have a standard-equipped conditioning center in this complex," he observed. He glanced at Roger. "For use by the staff and the slave contingent, correct?"

"Yes, sir," Roger nodded. "I did conditioning yesterday."

The man looked at Julia. "You'll get worked out to a fare-thee-well once they get their hands on you at the baby farm."

The girl grinned at that, saw Roger's questioning expression. "The Servants at the farm keep all the breeder slaves exercised really well," she explained, "and they always like to have me doing lots of neat stuff. I've been getting hand-to-hand fighting, too!"

Mr. Chriswell looked frustrated. "But I'm minus three days' worth of my workout routine, and I have three more site visits after I drop you off at the farm. I might find some time to visit a conditioning center, but not for another two or three days." He frowned, then nodded decisively. "I'll get in forty-five minutes or an hour right now."

He regarded the scatter of collar parts on the tabletop with a rueful expression, then smiled at Roger. "I was going to have you show me the way, but I'm not done with this. Besides, I want that epoxy to cure properly, so you're staying right here, boy." He turned to Julia. "Keep him company. I'm sure you'll find something to occupy your time."

Mr. Chriswell turned toward the door.

"Sir!" called Roger, seeing that the man was going out without anything on at all. "Sir, you're naked!"

Mr. Chriswell paused, puzzled. "So?"

"Uh, sir, the clients 3;" Roger blushed. "I've never seen the clients go around in the corridors naked, sir. I mean, for us slaves, yeah. But never the clients."

Mr. Chriswell sighed. "Small town America." He looked sharply at Julia. "Check the cabinets. There has to be a robe, exercise clothes, something. This is a standard comfort complex, after all."

Julia rummaged, and turned up stuff that Roger had never known was kept in a sex room, including the kinds of pale green tee-shirts and shorts that kids wore in conditioning centers back home, only in grown-up sizes. Julia knew her Master's sizes, and brought him everything he needed – even a support pouch and a pair of exercise sandals – sealed in cellowrap. She let Roger open up the shirt and the sandals, and she had her owner dressed for exercise in just a minute.

Roger had no idea that a client could want to do anything but have sex in a comfort complex, and the idea of somebody from outside the complex using the exercise machines and the track on their own instead of going over to the regular big conditioning center that all the free citizens in Hadleyville used was 3; well, weird! Sure, the DMs and the slave cops from the county barracks did their work-outs here, but a client?

"Master," the girl cautioned, "you've gotta stretch out and warm up real good first. Remember the last time?"

Showing mild embarrassment, Mr. Chriswell nodded. "You're never going to let me forget that, are you?"

"Master, you were sore for a week." He fussed with the waistband of his exercise shorts a little. "I don't mind rubbing your muscles, but I'm going to be at the baby farm, and there won't be anybody to take care of you!"

The man smiled, leaned over and kissed Julia on the forehead.

"Yes, little mother."

And then Mr. Chriswell was out the door, letting it close behind him.

Seeing Roger looking pretty much completely confused, Julia giggled.

"Master hates exercise. He likes work – he works really hard! – but it's work like this –" she indicated the collar guts spread out on one side of the table "– and not the physical fitness stuff. He thinks its boring."

Roger nodded. Well, so did he. Except for the swimming. And the running, as long as he didn't have to race anybody. It sucked being the slowest.

"You want him to take you with him," said Julia. "Don't you?"

Roger shrugged. "I don't mind doing more conditioning. He might like to have somebody show him how the machines work, but there's always one or two servitors over there if he needs somebody." Then Roger understood what Julia meant, and he nodded. "You mean when he leaves tomorrow? When you and him 3; go away?" The boy felt himself blushing. "I mean, if he could 3;"

She shook her head. "He can't." Julia hesitated. "But he doesn't have to. Boy 3;" She walked around doing little straightening-up things, gathering the discarded clothes wrappers and putting them in the waste receptacle on her way to dump the leftover coffee and rinse out the little coffeemaker. Then she looked at Roger.

"I don't know for sure what Master wants to do. He likes you. I can tell. I've never seen him like a boy outside the order the way he's liking you."

"Huh?" Roger was following her around, but at that he stood stock still. "Mistress, he hasn't even, uh, you know. Done the sex to me."

"Oh, bah!" She shook the water off the coffee-making thing, frowned at him. "You think I don't know the Master? He wants you, and not just for the sex." She made a fbbbpft! sound with her lips. "Boy-butt is cheap. In a place like this, it's free. If all he wanted was to stuff you full of man-meat, he would've dumped you on the bed, done you 'til you couldn't breathe, and then he would've had lunch."

Julia paused for a moment. "He would've made sure you got fed afterwards, though. Master treats even stupid boys nicely."

"I'm not smart, Mistress."

She grimaced at him. "Look, you're a slave, not an idiot. You can't even act stupid. You haven't had enough practice yet." Julia grabbed Roger's wrist, pulled him over to the bed and made the boy sit down on the edge of it, parking herself at arm's length from him, fixing him with her gaze.

"Boy, the Master wanted to rape you the moment he saw you. Not use you like a sani-wipe to squirt full of the sperms. To rape you, the way a Master of the order tests a new captive as a candidate for slaving. I was with him when he did the testing twice before, and both of those boys fought him all the way, crying and yelling and trying to escape, but he put his sperms up inside each of them to find out how the boy was good for making into a slave, to make the boy know that he belonged to the order, and that he could never get away.

"But Master doesn't have to do that to you, boy! He can tell you're the kind of boy who has to be a slave of the order, that you really were born to be one of them." Roger could see tears glistening in Julia's eyes. "Not a slave in a place like this. In the order. That you're the kind of slave I could never be, no matter how much I want to be, because I'm a girl and you're, you're 3;"

Roger slipped closer and put his arm around her, not wanting her to cry, but not knowing what to say. That I know it's not fair? That I can't be the kind of slave she can't be either, on account of the Slave Authority has already spoiled me for it?

"At least you're gonna grow up and have his babies, Mistress."

That made her smile at him, but kinda sad. She nodded. "Lots of babies for him," she said. "Most of them are going to be given to the order, to be slaves. Raised as slaves, from before they can remember any different. Other Masters have done that, their own little boys put into slavery to grow up serving the order. But he's going to choose the best of them – maybe three, maybe four – to be his own sons, to give them real names and raise them as real human beings."

Her grin became kind of funny-crooked. "All my little boys will see the secret places where I'm not allowed to go, and serve in the ceremonies I'm not supposed to know about, and they'll be slaves and Servants and Masters long after I can't have any more babies for their father."

Jeez, is that something 3; bad? Roger thought about it as Julia put her head on his shoulder and hugged him back.

But even though he'd had sisters, Roger didn't really know anything about girls. He'd seen stuff on the vids, about how girls had feelings more than boys did, and cried more. But Mistress Julia wasn't like a regular girl, was she? Not only being a slave, of course, but with her hair cut like a boy's and being the personal slave of a man like Mr. Chriswell and actually made to be his own special breeder slut once she got old enough.

I mean, Julia isn't really like a plain old boring regular girl at all, is she?

And now she was leaning on Roger's shoulder and you could tell that she was about to start crying like he'd seen in some of those vids, and Roger didn't know what he was supposed to do. He'd never figured on doing anything like this for a girl, especially one who was older and bigger than Roger himself.

Kind of automatically, Roger held Mistress Julia with one arm and, well, petted her with his other hand, stroking her boy-style hair and running his hand up and down her back, and going 'It'll be all right', all the time not knowing just what it was he was supposed to be 'there-there-ing' about. That she was going to have Mr. Chriswell's babies? That some of them were going to be made into slaves, and others were going to be real boys?

Well, that was kind of weird, yeah. Why couldn't all of Mr. Chriswell's sons be regular kids? Did they need extra slave boys? Roger tried to imagine a dad who'd make his own sons into sex slaves, on purpose, maybe from before those kids were old enough to know different, and for some reason the thought of it gave Roger a rush of sex feelings that made him just a little bit shuddery for a moment. It was such a nasty, evil idea!

A boy like that could be, like, the best kind of sex slave a Master could get!

"Haven't you been Mr. Chriswell's sex slave since you were a baby, Mistress? Will that be so bad for your babies?"

Julia raised her head, blinking at Roger, her face more than just a little bit wet with tears, and Roger leaned toward the little table alongside the head of the bed to get her a wipe. She swabbed and blotted and blew her nose pretty good before speaking.

"For my babies?" she said. "How some of them 3;" She hesitated, grimaced. "Most of them." A sigh, a nod. "They're going to be slaves, just like me. Their brothers will be free. Their brothers will be Masters! Powerful men in the order! Some of my babies will grow up to use their brothers for sex, their own brothers for the secret ceremonies and celebrations of the order. Other Masterly families in the order have done it. My Master told me that his father had done it to Master's brothers. His half-brothers, I mean. Do you know what a half-brother is?"

Roger kinda did. "When your mom adopts a farm baby, and he gets to be your brother?"

Julia smiled, shaking her head. "That's not a half-brother. A half-brother is a boy who has a father or a mother the same as your own, but not both. The two of you share a dad, or you share a mom, but either you've got different moms or different dads. Understand?"

"Oh, like my sisters. Their daddy was my mom's first husband, and then they got divorced, and mom had me," he explained. The few times Roger had met the girls' daddy, the man had been nice to him – in a sort of stand-off-ish way. "So Mr. Chriswell's daddy had Mr. Chriswell with his wife," Roger reasoned, "and then Mr. Chriswell's daddy had sex with, like, another lady to make slave babies?"

"He had four different breeder sluts impregnated," Julia expanded. "And that was before my Master had been born. I don't really know how many half-brothers my Master had." She frowned. "I'm not even sure if my Master hasn't already made some babies on the breeder sluts at the farm. Lots of the Masters in the order do that, of course."

Really? Roger had never thought about how Masters might do stuff to slave sluts just to get them pregnant. But, heck, those farm babies had to get made somehow, right? Roger had known about how babies got made for, like, years.

Two, almost, wasn't it?

Chapter 19

It was just that before today Roger had never thought about how Masters might have secret, illegal slaves, either. If you thought about one thing, the other stuff made sense, didn't it?'

In a really sick kinda grown-up way.

Every time you think you've got grown-ups figured out 3;

"So Mr. Chriswell – your Master – has done sex to his own brothers, Mistress?"

Julia shrugged. "I don't know. I think Master's father made most of his slave-babies a long time before Master was born. I've never met the Master's father." She shuddered. "I heard that he was a very powerful Master." She looked at Roger. "A very cruel Master."

"Is he, uh, dead, Mistress?"

She nodded. "Before I was born. I've, I've seen vids of him, in the ceremonies." Again the shudder. "It's hard to believe he was my Master's father. Master's not anything like that!"

Trying very hard not to show it in his expression, Roger knew – just knew – that Mistress Julia had never spent any time in an indoctrination center. Had to be one of the good things about growing up as a slave instead of getting made into one, right?

Besides, she'd never had to spend half a day getting tied up and beaten and sexed all kinds of ways by a couple of grown-ups who liked to spank and even whip a kid just to make the poor little guy beg them to stop.

Then Roger looked at Julia for a moment and hugged her close again, realizing that he never wanted that to happen to her. Not ever. It's okay for me, he thought, but she's special. She's gonna be a mom!

If anybody had to get used by a grown-up who liked to hurt kids, let it happen to somebody tough. Like good old 6-4-3-9 here.

I can take that kinda stuff, thought the boy grimly. I already have, haven't I?

In school, Roger had learned about how animals get turned into food. Chickens and cows and pigs have to get born, and fed grass and corn and stuff, and then they have to get killed so that kids can have ham sandwiches and hot dogs and hamburgers and chicken tenders. Even slave rations've got meat in them.

It's not very tasty, but it's meat, right?

So one of Roger's teachers had told the class about how those animals were born and fed and everything just so they could get turned into stuff for people to eat. If it weren't for that, those animals would've never even happened. Their moms and dads wouldn't have happened, their grandparents wouldn't have happened. Same thing with the kinds of fruits and vegetables you ate. None of that stuff 'just happened'. Farmers decided what they wanted to grow – plants and animals – and they made it happen. They made choices, they did things deliberately, and they made sure that they got the best kinds of bacon and beef and chicken tenders they could, so people could have food to eat.

Roger did his best to explain all that to Julia, figuring that a personal sex slave – even if she was a breeder slut – wouldn't have had stuff like this in school because Roger knew that slaves didn't have school the way real kids did.

Julia had smiled at Roger, and said that she'd heard about this stuff anyway.

"Okay," Roger continued. "Then what you've got to know about your babies – the ones who are going to be slaves – is that if Mr. Chriswell isn't going to make those babies to become slave boys, then he wouldn't make them inside you, right? They'd never happen." He paused, thinking.

"Look, Mistress, you're an awfully nice girl. Maybe you're the nicest I've ever met, and you're not a real human being. You're a slave. You've always been a slave, you'll always be a slave. But if Mr. Chriswell hadn't decided to get you made – to have his babies for him – you wouldn't have happened, and I wouldn't have met you, or known about you, are gotten to like you so much. Understand?"

The girl gave Roger a real smile this time. "Don't say that 'not a human being' thing around the Master," she told him. "He doesn't think that about slaves. Every one of us is a real person to him, and to all the other Masters in the order. Real and alive and thinking and feeling. Master says that it's what makes a slave valuable." She looked down at the bedspread, her smile going a bit shy. "He says it makes me precious to him."

"Me, too," Roger said without thinking. "I mean, now that I know who you are. If, if you weren't alive any more, I'd feel pretty awful."

Julia blinked at him. "Why," she said, "you're just about the sweetest little slave boy I've ever met."

Roger realized what he'd said and cursed himself silently for being a complete doofus. "I, I didn't mean it that way! I just, well, kinda like you, Mistress." He pressed his lips together for an instant. "It's 'cause you're so important to Mr. Chriswell."

She laughed. "Oh, yeah. And you love the Master, don't you?" Then she looked at him kinda funny.

"Oh," she said. "You do, don't you?"

Roger gave are an Are you nuts? look. "Mistress, he's a client. And he's a real special client, too. You think just anybody can get permission to stay overnight here?" He paused. "Besides, he's a very nice man. Any slave boy here would try to take real good care of him. And they'd try to take good care of you, too, 'cause you're his."

Julia's expression went funny in a kinda different way. "I'm not a 'Mistress', boy. I'm a slave, just like you."

The boy started to speak, stopped, grimaced. "I know, Mistress – I mean 3; Oh, doggone it! You don't act like a slave, not even a girl slave. Not even a grown-up girl slave. I can't think about you like just another sex slave, 'cause you're not." Roger pointed to her cunny, with the little piercings and the teensy lock that showed how Julia was never supposed to get a penis up inside her front parts until she was ready to start making babies.

"You got that, and I've never even heard of a girl slave who didn't get sex in her vagina. I don't care if you do have a collar and a leg tattoo. You don't think like a slave. Heck, you don't think like a real girl, either." Roger pondered for an instant. "You think better than a real girl." He nodded decisively. "Yeah, better."

Julia pondered visibly. "Boy, do you like having sex with girls?"

It was Roger's turn to blink. "Mistress?"

"It's a simple question." Julia pressed her lips together, glaring at him. "Do you like doing sexy things with girls? You can't put your penis in my cunny, of course, but there are lots of nice things you can do to make me feel good, just the way I can do things for you. But do you like doing that kind of stuff?"

Mistress, Roger thought, I'm a slave. I'm not supposed to like doing sex with a client. I'm just supposed to do it!

"I, I know how, Mistress." He shrugged helplessly. "I haven't done it much, but they taught me pretty good." He thought about Mistress Annalise, who'd really enjoyed teaching Roger at the indoctrination center, and he hadn't been allowed even to put a fingertip in her vagina, either.

"I don't want to know how well you can do it," said Julia. "I want to know if you like doing it. Lots of boys don't like having sex with girls." She looked pointedly at Roger's dickie, which was anything but hard. "Maybe you don't, either."

"Mistress 3;"

"I'm not a Mistress!" she flared.

"I don't care!" Roger yelled right back. "I like you! Understand? Not all sexy, maybe, but I think you're nice!" He calmed down some. "I don't have to get a stiffie to like you, Mistress, or to want to make you feel good. If I was still a real boy, I think maybe I'd like to have you as the first girl friend I'd ever have. Not 'girlfriend', like that, but a friend who's a girl. Y'know, like to hang around with and talk to and stuff like that."

Julia looked at him. "You mean to play dollies and things? Tea parties?"

Sissy stuff? Roger made a face before he realized he'd done it. "No! Nothing like that mushy nonsense. I mean to do any of the stuff that guys like to do, to talk with, and hang around with. Because you're not like a regular girl, all stuck-up to make a boy feel 3; stupid. Uh, do you understand?"

The girl frowned. "You mean because Master keeps my hair cut short, so I look like a boy?"

Roger shrugged. "Yeah, maybe. A little. It sure makes a guy think about you different, doesn't it?" Halfway hesitating, Roger reached up again and ran the fingers of one hand over her head, feeling the clean, fuzzy warmth and sensing her kind of nodding into his touch, telling him that she liked it. "You're, well, you're pretty, y'know? Like some boys I've seen, not 'girl-pretty', but boy-pretty, and that's not bad, is it?"

"I think I'd like to be 'girl-pretty'," said Julia in a little voice. "The sluts at the baby farm, they wear their hair long enough that you can tell they're girls."

"Well, they all got boobies, right? Breasts, I mean. Girls your age, 'n mine, don't." Roger tentatively ran his fingertips over one of Julia's nice, flat nipples. "You've just got good muscle here, none of that bulgy jiggly stuff. Pretty!"

The girl smiled, shaking her head ruefully. "Boys! You don't like nice, big breasts?"

Roger stiffened slightly. "M-Mistress, the grown-up lady clients, the ones who use us slave boys for the sex 3; they're not nice to us. I don't think that nice ladies use slave boys – us little guys – for their sexing."

Julia nodded. "I know. I've seen some of the vids." She looked sympathetically at Roger. "Have any of them ever 3; hurt you, the way they show it in the vids?"

Well, Roger had seen vids like that, too. The training vids to show a slave boy how he was supposed to be good for those mean ladies to use him, and some of that was a lot worse than even what had already happened to him since he'd got slaved. "Yes, Mistress. Most of them, really. Hurting a boy is a big part of why they come to a comfort complex. They can have regular sex with other grown-ups, and lots of them do, in the sex rooms here while they're sharing one or two slave kids."

"I've never really tortured a slave boy," said Julia. "Not on my own." She shivered. "Might like to try it, though!"

Roger goggled at her. "Mistress?" He shifted a little. "Y-you wouldn't want to do that, would you? R-really?"

She glanced at his dickie and giggled. "No, but maybe you'd like it!"

The boy followed her gaze and blushed, realizing that he'd suddenly gone stiff as a tenpenny nail. "Mistress!"

"Lots of boys get all horny when they know somebody wants to do nasty stuff to them," Julia said smugly. "Master showed me that, and I've seen it in lots of sex vids, too." She hesitated. "Some of those boys got really ashamed having me watch while the Master did the torture to them. I could tell it made the hurting worse for them, but I, I just couldn't not look, or not help Master do the hurt to them. They were so beautiful!"

Roger grimaced, but he understood more than just a little. Clients had made him be their 'assistant' with doing sex-torture to other boys, just the way other slave boys had helped tie up Roger and do bad things to him. Grown-ups liked making slave boys be awful to each other, and if you couldn't hide how sick-making it was for you – especially if you kinda liked the other boy – that seemed to make it even more fun for those grown-ups.

"I like slaveboys," said Julia. She folded one leg up onto the bed, tucking the heel of it up against the opposite buttock. "I kinda grew up with a bunch of little boys, and most of them were slaves – or they were going to be made slaves."

Mistress Julia explained that right after she'd been born, she had been brought to that little baby farm that the order owned and ran, where the sluts and the Servants had all taken care of her.

"Master visited a lot," she explained, "and I guess I can't remember a time when he ever, you know, ignored me. But the sluts did all the 'mommy' stuff with me. I guess they were the ones who taught me how to walk and talk, did the potty training." The girl grinned. "Not that I ever got to wear regular clothes once I got out of diapers. I don't know how you regular kids stand that!"

Well, it was hard for Roger to understand how the other slaveboys got used to being bare-naked all the time. Roger had been sort of pretending that he was at the swimming pool, or in the locker room, at the conditioning center back home. All the boys went skinny there, 'most all the time.

"I got my tracker insert when I was a baby," she continued, patting her right bottom cheek, "same as you regular kids get your medical chip on the other side. Mine handles both functions. Master designed it that way."

"When did you get your slave mark, Mistress?" Roger nodded toward the big tattoo on her right thigh. "I mean, all the slaveboys and girls here used to be regular people, so we got them done to us right after we got enslaved, in the indoctrination centers."

"Oh, it was right after my sixth birthday. That's regulation for us 'born' registered slaves, or for kids who get enslaved before they're six. They put me to sleep, and a couple of days after it was done and my leg wasn't sore anymore, Master visited the farm and I got a second sixth birthday party." She laughed. "That extra birthday party for me as a registered slave made the other kids kinda jealous."

"There were free kids at the baby farm?" Roger was puzzled. Then: "They put you to sleep for the tattoo? How come they didn't do that for us?"

Julia blushed a little. "Master says that the Slave Authority wants the tattooing and all the rest of it to really hurt for a regular kid getting enslaved. Its to make you know that you're not, y'know, anything but a slave anymore." She looked sad. "I'm sorry, boy. I realize that I don't know – not really know – what it was like for you to get turned into a slave at an indoctrination center. I've seen the vids, but I know that the vids can't tell anybody how awful it is for one of you regular kids."

"But you had free kids at the baby farm?"

Julia shrugged. "Free? Not exactly. None of the order's slaves are registered. Secret, remember? But only a few of the boys at the farm are ever going to grow up free.

"Lots of the other Masters of the order make some of their own 'official' children using the baby farm sluts. Sometimes all of their sons and daughters are farm babies. Not all Masters get married, and not all of them have wives who want to be moms. Either a technician will use some of that Master's sperm to inseminate a slut, or a Master will visit and do the sex to the slut he's chosen. I got taught how to do the testing to tell when a slut was on her cycle ready for breeding, and then we'd call the Master who was planning to make a new son or daughter on her, and he'd come down over the next few days to impregnate the slut."

She sighed kind of dreamy-eyed. "That's so old-fashioned and romantic. When a Master puts his seed right into a slut's vagina, it means he doesn't care if the baby is a boy or a girl. When they do the insemination, the technicians can separate the girl-sperm from the boy-sperm, and almost all the Masters only want boys." A grimace. "I think it's nicer to leave it up to Mother Nature, don't you?"

Roger didn't know how to respond to that. Nobody had ever cared about his opinion on boy babies versus girl babies before.

The girl shrugged. "But all of the Masters use the sluts to make slave boys to serve the order. They have the Servants – the technicians – do the artificial insemination to get the sluts pregnant, because they want only the boy-making sperms to go in."

"Well, you were deliberately made from girl-sperm, weren't you, Mistress?"

She looked at him kinda cross, but it didn't last. "At the baby farm," she continued, "there are lots of little kids, and not just babies. There are pre-schoolers and even kids older than you. They live there, in the crèche section. Most of them got born there. Some – like me – were brought in as babies, and some are kids who live at the farm part of the year, the way I do when Master goes places I'm not allowed to be." She smiled. "But now that I'm grown up enough, I don't sleep in the crèche anymore. I share one of the dorm rooms with two or three of the sluts, just as if I was waiting to have a baby."

Roger grinned. "Which you are, Mistress. I mean, kind of."

Julia smiled at that and nodded, pleased to be reminded how special she was. "I'm one of the only girls on the farm – I mean, the only girls who aren't sluts, or waiting to grow up enough to be used as sluts – who's a registered slave. Even though I'm still a virgin down here –" she indicated her cunny "– being registered means I can go along with Master almost anywhere he travels, and that's absolutely the best!"

"There are other girls, Mistress? I mean, regular girls? Free ones?"

"A few," she confirmed. "Never as many as there are boys, of course." Julia made a face. "The Masters would rather have boys for just about everything. A few of them have daughters, and grow them at the farm until they're old enough to send away to boarding schools, and after that they come back to visit sometimes on holidays." A sigh. "Some of them still treat me like I'm their little sister, because they 'mothered' me when I was a baby. It's so annoying now that I'm grown up."

"What's it like at the baby farm, Mistress?" Roger settled himself on one elbow to listen. Since he'd gotten slaved, he'd absolutely never had time just to talk with somebody like this. And Mistress Julia was so smart, and knew so much about stuff Roger had never heard of.

"Oh, it's a really nice place," the girl said. "I've never been to a regular baby farm, but the one the order runs is way different from the ones I've seen on the vids. None of them have a regular crèche the way we do. Just a nursery where the babies are kept until they're ready to go to the regular women who want them. We've got tons of babies – all ages – and plenty of little kids running around. We've got playgrounds, and pools, and dogs and cats. The sluts are kept busy there, I'll tell you! Not just exercising for conditioning, but chasing toddlers and wiping noses and changing diapers. Even the ones who complain all the time just love it. I guess if a grown-up woman has to be a breeder slut, the order's baby farm is the place to do it. Each of them gets to be more of a real mom than any regular slut does."

Julia frowned. "I mean, at a regular baby farm, they lose their babies right after they give birth. Free citizens adopt them. At the order's farm, almost all the time, a slut gets to see and take care of each baby she has, and for years if she wants to." A grin. "Besides, she's got lots of help doing it. Some of the sluts stay on after their indenture terms end, not getting impregnated anymore, but getting paid for working there, just so they can be with the little boys and girls they birthed. They even start wearing work clothes instead of going slave-naked after they get that 'promotion', so nobody will mistake them for sluts anymore."

"It sounds 3; real nice," Roger said. He thought for a moment. "You say that the Masters have their own kids living there? Along with the boys they're raising to be sex slaves?"

"Sure," replied Julia. She laughed. "When they're little, there's no real difference. One bare-naked little boy looks pretty much like another. Some of the Masters don't even start deciding whether one of their boys is going to grow up free or serve the order as a slave until the child is six or seven years old. Remember, none of the ones who are going to serve the order are legal slaves. None are ever registered. The government doesn't even know they're alive."

Roger remembered his mom taking him to get into Kindergarten. "No birth certificates?"

The girl grinned. "The order has ways to make birth certificates kind of 'appear' when they need them. When a Master decides that one of his sons is going to be a real human being, and knows that he'll be sent off to one of those boarding schools to start getting him educated, that boy gets a nice, official birth certificate and shows up in the official records. Master's going to do it that way for some of my little boys – and for my little girl! He promised."

"So when you have a girl, she's going to be a free citizen?"

Julia nodded. "You bet. Right from the beginning. The best schools and everything, but only after I get to have her and take care of her for six or eight years." A distant look came over her face, just for an instant. "My little girl is going to grow up with all the advantages. My Master's daughter, sired on his officially registered concubine." She dimpled. "Me!"

"But a boy doesn't know for sure whether he's going to be a slave?" Roger asked. "Not until he's old enough for First Grade?"

Julia nodded. "Or older. Like I said, it's not decided until the Master who sired him makes the decision. Until then, a boy is just another naked little kid, running around and getting into mischief. They all have to spend a few hours in the crèche classrooms every day, depending on how old they are. It's to teach them their ABC's and their numbers, but mostly to get them used to behaving themselves. Even slaves need that, right?"

She hesitated, looking at Roger again. "Oh, you mean do we treat the free boys differently from the slaveboys?" A pause. "Well, yes. There are 3; changes after a boy's been decided. We start getting the free boys used to being called 'Master', and the slaveboys get taught their manners." Her smile was kinda wobbly. "Not like the DMs teach you to be servile, but to know that they're going to spend their lives serving the order. Most of them are very proud of that. After all, the men they see every day at the farm are Servants. All of them had been slaves when they were boys.

"Then every six or eight weeks, one of the order's catch teams arrives at the farm, and they gather up one or two of the slaveboys – usually the older ones, eight years old, or nine. I don't remember many slaveboys staying at the farm after they reach their tenth birthdays, and I don't remember any of the Masters' sons not going off to boarding school by the time they're seven or eight."

Julia looked sad, then. "Sometimes – not often – a catch team takes one of the boys just turned six, or almost."

Roger wondered why her manner had changed. A six-year-old slaveboy was supposed to be ready for the sex with grown-up men. They were little, sure, but there were ways for men to use their dickies in a six-year-old's bottom that wouldn't damage him. Roger thought about that seven-year-old slaveboy he'd served those clients with, that one time. You didn't have to be a big kid to be really good at the sex.

"It must be 3; kinda strange for the boys chosen to be regular kids," Roger said. "I mean, they don't live in anything like a normal home, and then they get told that a grown-up man is their for-real father, and they've got a real family and everything. Do they do okay in school?"

"Sure. The order doesn't make stupid babies, and the Masters try to pick only the best little boys to become their legal sons." She tilted her head just a bit, thoughtfully. "Every three or four months, we get a visit by a couple or three Masters of the order, and they do an evaluation on each of the boys five or older, the ones chosen to be slaves and the 'undecided' ones. They even examine each boy, almost exactly the way a doctor does. I've been allowed to watch sometimes. The boys are always very well-behaved. I'm sure they're scared of those Masters."

Well, it sounds like they oughtta be, thought Roger.

"I think," Julia continued, "that each Master holds off deciding whether he's going to choose a particular one of the boys he's sired to become his own official son so that he can make sure he's got a smart and healthy child to carry on the family name. By the time one of those boys is six or seven, you can tell, right?"

Roger had never thought about something like that, but slowly he nodded. It did make sense. How many boys in his class back home had been, well, stupid? If a daddy could wait until you could tell whether a boy was a dud before saying: 'That one's my son', there would be better kids growing up in your family.

And the not-so-good little boys getting slaved.

Would Roger have been slaved by his own parents if it worked that way? He felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Probably. Maybe for sure.

Mr. Chriswell was wrong, he thought. I really was born to be a slave 3;

"It sounds like the order uses a lot of slaveboys, Mistress."

Julia shrugged. "I suppose you could say that." She hesitated. "Not all of the boys taken by the catch teams – or grown on the baby farm – stay with the order forever."

"Oh? I thought they get to be senior slaves, and then Servants. Some of them get sold? Or 3;" he tried to think of the word " 3;'mancipated?"

The girl laughed. "Emancipated. No, there's no need for emancipation. None of the order's slaveboys is ever officially enslaved. You can't legally free a slave if the government doesn't list him as a slave, can you? But there are those other 3; organizations 3; whose Masters value the boys enslaved by the order, and if the Masters decide that it's best, a transfer is made." She got that sad look on her face. "Master doesn't like it when that happens, but he's very junior in the order, and it won't be for years and years that he'll be able to make the traditionalists re-think those transfers. He says that once a loyal slaveboy has been accepted and initiated, that boy should spend his whole life serving the order. It should be considered a bond, on the honor of Mastery."

Roger didn't understand all of that, but it made him like Mr. Chriswell even more. But what if a boy – or a grown-up Servant – didn't want to work for the order all his life? Sure, you could get so used to the order being everything you knew, but wouldn't some of these guys just naturally get tired of it?

Think of it like you had a secret club, and after a while a member decides he doesn't want to belong anymore. If you keep him in – make him come to the meetings, force him to pay his dues, drag him along when the club marches in the Thanksgiving Day parade (would a secret club do that kind of thing? maybe not) – that would just make the person hate your club and everybody in it, and what fun would that kind of a club be, anyway?

Maybe the best way wasn't to quit transferring slaveboys, but to quit doing it if a slaveboy didn't want to get transferred. Or figure out a way to let the kid get out of being a slave altogether. If the order wasn't making slaves for 'enlightened penal servitude', they could just say to a slaveboy 'Okay, we'll turn you loose', and maybe help him get a job and a place to live, and the ex-slaveboy could stay friendly with the order as a sort of 'inside' outsider.

Mr. Gregory – the old man who had been one of Roger's mom's neighbors back home – used to talk about how it was better to have some troublemakers on the inside of the tent pissing out rather than on the outside of the tent pissing in, but wasn't it even better to have those potential troublemakers outside, aiming their peckers away from the tent?

But nobody listens to a slaveboy piece of filth, do they? Roger kinda sighed without showing it.

Chapter 20

"Doing the sex to girls is okay, Mistress." Roger backed off a little to look at Julia solemnly. "I like making a girl have her good feelings." There, he'd said it, and it was true. And if Mistress Julia was hinting that Roger should do sex stuff with her, Roger was perfectly happy to accommodate her. After all, it wasn't as if Julia were some kind of grown-up lady client who was here to make him do the really disgusting things grown-up woman liked to have little kids do for them.

In return, Julia's look was 3; well, vexed. That was a word Roger's mom had used a couple of times.

"Boy," said Julia, you are the most willfully obtuse male child I think I've ever met."

Roger couldn't help giving her a Huh? expression.

"Stubbornly evasive," said the girl. "Weaseling. You're not answering me, damn it."

She didn't say it like she was angry, but Roger got the message, and he felt his face go hot with embarrassment, looking down at the floor and Mistress Julia's dusty bare toes. Her feet looked kinda toughened compared with Rogers, which he realized came from going barefoot practically everywhere all her life.

"I, I guess," he said. "Mistress, I just don't know." Darn this blushing! "I haven't done the sex with girls that much, or for that long. Boys, yeah. Everybody does sex stuff with his friends, I guess. I don't know any boys who don't, unless its the ones with really strict parents."

There had been a couple of guy like that back home, boys in some of the classes ahead of Roger's, who couldn't even pee at the urinals. They did their Number One in the toilets, with the doors closed, and they almost never used the swimming pool at the conditioning center unless it was a testing day and everybody had to wear swim suits. Weird.

The tone of Julia's voice softened. "Boy 3;?" And Roger looked up a little, at her hands. They were folded in her lap. "Do you want to have sex with 3; me?"

When Roger's eyes got up to Mistress Julia's face, there was a kind of hopeful look about her, and he knew that if he were really stupid he was going to say something that would hurt her, and that would be pretty awful.

"Mistress, I don't want to do sex to you – I mean, I don't just want to do sex to you." He tightened his arm around her shoulders a little, for just a moment. "The sex would be awful nice, and I'll do it as best as I can, but I don't want to be just sex for you." He thought for a second. "I know I'm a filthy, dirty pegboy, and we're never gonna see each other after you and Mr. Chriswell leave tomorrow morning, but I want to be friends with you. L-like I used to have friends when I was a real human being."

Doggone it, but was he starting to cry? Roger brushed the back of his free hand over one eye, then the other. Yep. What a baby!

"I've got boys who are friends," said the girl. "At the baby farm, all the boys there are my crèche brothers. Those sexy games you used to play with your friends back home? Don't you think we all played the same kinds of games in the crèche and all over the rest of the farm." She smiled a little. "All those naked little boys running around. You think we wouldn't?"

Roger had to grin at that. The grown-ups had used to complain all through summer vacations, back in the old neighborhood. When the weather got hot, if they could get most of the really little guys to wear skimpies – those 'boy panties' that barely covered any of a kid's butt – the parents figured they were doing pretty good, and last summer all of Roger's bunch had made a solemn agreement not to get cheated out of their skimpies for those stupid shorts, so everybody could finish the summer with almost-all-over tans.

Most of them (including Roger) had gotten away with it, too.

"But, Mistress," Roger explained, "it wouldn't be the same with you. Playing sex, I mean. You're like, almost a client. Besides, you're more than that. You're smart. You've been to lots of different places. You know stuff. You're special."

He stared down at her toes again, disgusted at the way he knew he was blushing. "I'm not good enough to be your friend, but I don't just want to be a sex slave and be servile for you." He looked up. "I like you, Mistress. It's not just slave sex if a guy likes you, and it's not being friends if I'm a not-human piece of filth and you're, you're 3;"

Julia kind of grabbed Roger around the shoulders and flipped him all the way onto the bed, flat on his back. He was a little bit surprised at how strong she was, but then he remembered that she'd been getting hand-to-hand training from the Servants at the baby farm.

The look in her eyes was angry as she climbed up to straddle him on her hands and knees, and Roger knew that he'd stupided up again.

"Boy," she said, "if I were a grown-up man – like the Master – I'd rape you right now. You really need to get raped. You need something to shake you out of this, this funk you're wallowing in."

Then she leaned down and kissed Roger on the mouth, not really 'mushy-romantic', but not just 'friendly', either.

Roger had been a slave for enough time not to try getting away from that kiss, but he didn't more than kinda halfway cooperate with it, either. It surprised him more than just a little. Mistress Julia didn't seem to be the 'kissing' type, did she?

Well, not until right this minute.

"The expression you're looking for, boy 3;" she paused for an instant " 3; is 'making love'. It's not just sex, but sex is almost always a part of it. Its when two people -" she flashed him a grin "- or maybe three – get close to each other and show their affection for each other, not just their lust."

She cleared her throat, settling one hand on each of Roger's shoulders. "Now, I feel a normal and natural lust for you. Understand that?"

Bewildered, Roger nonetheless nodded. One of the things he'd definitely learned was 'lust'. Clients lusted for sex slaves. It was the reason why they came to a comfort complex, right? Sometimes Roger even admitted that he 'lusted' for some of the grown-ups. Mr. Cowper, for instance, and a couple of the nicer teenagers who had used him four or five times. Those guys were sexy, and Roger almost didn' t mind them doing the sex in his bottom, even though teenagers almost always jammed it in really hard.

This was the first time, though, that Roger had grappled with the idea that a girl – and a slave girl, too – could feel lust for a piece-of-filth slaveboy like himself. He would've figured that with a handsome grown-up owner like Mr. Chriswell, Julia would have something so good that a newly-met slaveboy wouldn't even be on the sonar (where you spotted stuff under the water), much less on the radar.

"Have you ever loved anybody, boy?"

Instantly, Roger flashed on Jimmy and Mr. Cowper. Now, they loved each other. No doubt about it. If both of them were free, and grown-up, Roger figured that they'd be married to each other, even though neither one of them looked or acted 'faggy' like you saw the homo guys on the vids.

Heck, but hadn't Roger done 'three-ways' with homo married couples a bunch of times? None of those guys had acted faggy, had they? But this was Hadleyville. Maybe the homos were only allowed to act faggy in the big cities?

But thinking of 1-4-3-7 as married to anybody was stupid. Not only was Jimmy a slave boy, but Jimmy was a kid. Even if he were ever allowed to grow up, it wouldn't be for like ten years that he could get married.

Roger lay there under Mistress Julia's naked, tanned, warm, strong girl body and thought furiously about her. Wasn't she sort of married to Mr. Chriswell? She didn't treat him like he was her daddy – not really. More like (and wasn't that sort of sick?) he was her husband and she was his wife.

Well, Mr. Chriswell must have been doing the sex to Julia, if only in her bottom. Roger still couldn't figure out why Mr. Chriswell was keeping Julia a virgin in her cunny, but he agreed with the idea. Like I said, he thought, little girls' cunnies shouldn't take grown-up dickies in them. And Julia's cunny was extra-special because it led to the place where Mr. Chriswell would be getting his babies made.

But had Roger ever loved anybody? The way 1-4-3-7 loved Mr. Cowper? The way Julia loved Mr. Chriswell?

"N-no, Mistress." And Roger felt that pit-of-the-stomach churn all of a sudden, and for no good reason he wanted to cry. "I, I don't think I ever did."

She thought for what seemed like a long time, but it wasn't. "As a slave, you have to obey the orders of your clients." Julia nodded just a little. "And even though I'm simply another sex slave like yourself, you think of me as a client. All right." She focused her eyes fiercely on Roger's face.

"I order you to love me. Not just have sex with me, but love me, for who I am and what I can be to you, knowing that I'll be loving you right back. Understand, boy? I'm ordering you."

Wow, Roger thought, blinking. The DMs had told him and the other slaveboys – over and over – that they were not allowed to fall in love with the clients, especially not with their 'regulars' (because the DMs knew that each sex slave gets 'regulars', and 'regulars' tend to treat their favorite sex slaves kinda special because they really like those boys or girls or women or men. That's just the way people are, mostly).

Lust was okay. After you got made into a filthy slave, you were supposed to give in to your disgusting animal nature, 'cause you weren't a human kid at all anymore. Animals learned to take sexual pleasure in getting used by real people, the way a dog learned to like playing 'fetch'.

That was just the animal in you, coming out after the human being had been 'spiritually murdered'.

But love was a human thing, and Roger wasn't a human being any more.

Clients seemed to have trouble with that idea, and some – like Mr. Chriswell and Julia – just plain defied it, no matter how absolutely certain the 'spiritual murder' stuff was.

So how did those guys on 'disciplinary term indenture' get to be able to go back to living as real kids after they finished their terms?

For a grown-up servitor who was just a 'worker bee' in a place like the comfort complex, there hadn't been any kind of spiritual murder, so he could go back to being regular people, no problem. A boy or a girl who'd been forced to have sex with grown-up clients, month after month after month – each of them for longer than Roger had been a slave already – how could those kids get un-murdered after they were allowed to go home?

Well, it was a grown-up problem. They did it, right? So it had to be do-able.

But what was love like? The way 1-4-3-7 looked at Alan Cowper? Yeah, that must be it. Did Roger feel that way about Mistress Julia?

He didn't think so. But 3; wait a minute. Mistress Julia had done Roger a real nice 'friendly' dickie-sucking a little while ago. Thinking about her as a client had made Roger just accept it. Clients did stuff like that.

But if she had been a boy in Roger's old neighborhood, what would Roger have done?

No-brainer. If somebody sucks your dickie, you suck his. Fair is fair.

And just because Mistress Julia didn't have a dickie didn't mean that Roger didn't owe her a nice orgasm.

Okay. That I can do.

Reaching up all of a sudden, Roger grabbed Mistress Julia's chest with both hands and he shoved her over on her right side, in the middle of the big bed. She gave him a little bit of a fight, but when she realized that the boy was trying to turn the tables and not just get away, she kinda went with it. Roger got her over onto her back, with him on his hands and knees straddling her middle, his hands now on her arms, holding her down.

Still not saying a word (but not blushing, either!), Roger leaned down and kissed Mistress Julia, right on the mouth. Then on both cheeks, and on her eyebrows, and back on the lips again, this time doing the really mushy kind of kissing, with the tongue. He wasn't surprised to have Julia doing the tongue right back to him in return, and it made him feel sexy to hear the girl whimpering and feel her squirming at the sexiness of what Roger was doing.

When he'd been doing 'friendly' sex with some of the guys he'd really liked back home – remember Jackie Tedesco? – Roger had done stuff kinda like this. Especially with Jackie Tedesco, who got sort of cuddly after you'd given him his good feelings. Jackie was always okay with giving you a nice penis-sucking in return (though he always got his penis sucked first, and the most times whenever Roger was sleeping over at Jackie's house), but never right away.

Which you could understand. Jackie did his orgasms like a guy running for a touchdown, or for a goal in soccer. "Balls to the wall" was something Mr. Gregory had used to say about going all-out, and that sure fit Jackie, didn't it?

So Jackie had liked to snuggle, and he'd kinda work his way up to doing the penis-sucking on Roger. Not really 'kissy' or 'faggy', but when Jackie liked you, he cuddled up against you as if he was maybe two years old instead of eight-almost-nine, and his kisses were like a two-year-old's, too. Sort of slobbery.

Thinking about Jackie since Roger had been slaved always made him kinda ache inside. He missed Jackie sometimes.

So how come regular kids aren't allowed to come into a comfort complex and do the sex to us slaveboys?

That would be nice, darn it. It wasn't like you had to be 'indoctrinated' to do sexy stuff with free boys pretty much your own size, right?

Kissing Mistress Julia – showing 'initiative' like he wasn't ever supposed to – Roger felt her sort of melting underneath him. The sleek, well-muscled girl body was going relaxed even though you could feel little quivers going through her, and with every gasping breath Mistress Julia told him that she was getting all taken up with the sexy feelings. Roger had seen that happen with Mistress Annalise, too. That's when Roger knew it was time to start kissing further down, and he shifted to kiss the girl over her shoulders and then her chest.

Mistress Annalise had taught Roger that even little girls had titties. They just weren't any bigger than what were called 'rudimentary nipples' in boys. They were very sensitive, especially when a girl was feeling sexy, and you could make a girl – or a boy! – feel really good if you knew how to use them right. Normally, you just kissed them or kinda used your tongue on them, but Mistress Annalise had made Roger nibble on hers, and even bite them pretty hard. She'd groaned with happiness when Roger had obeyed her to pinch and twist those cute little almost-completely-flat bits of tenderness, especially when Roger had been using his mouth on the stuff between those 'labia' flaps.

So Roger nibbled on Mistress Julia's nipples, and he realized pretty quick that he was doing something right. Julia made like she couldn't ever get enough of that stuff, her hands rubbing all over Roger's shoulders and her fingers running through his hair, cradling his head – not hard, but you could feel how much she liked him and wanted him to go on with it.

But you can't just keep doing one thing. Heck, Jackie Tedesco had taught him that in First Grade that time when he'd stopped sucking Roger's dickie after the third good feelings (Jackie was sort of trying to figure out how many times in a row he could do it, a kind of 'tickle torture' for Roger) and got up on top of Roger face-to-face for their first-ever kissing session.

Roger had been too worn down by the good feelings to shove Jackie off, and it was only after maybe fifteen minutes that one or the other of them had started to giggle, then both did, and you can't do serious kissing when either guy gets a fit of the giggles.

So down along Mistress Julia's smooth, pretty belly Roger went, heading for her cunny.

Now, everybody's private zone is the same in back, but in front you've got boys' junk sticking out while girls' stuff kinda folds in. That meant Roger was definitely worried by the piercing-and-padlock arrangement that made Mistress Julia's chastity.

Fortunately, Roger knew a lot more about girls' naughty bits than he'd ever learned in Health class at school, because he'd been hands-on (and even tongue-on) with grown-up ladies and Mistress Annalise and those two slave girls.

The ladies had those sloppy twats, with big vaginas that not even the thickest grown-up dickie could fill up, and even though Roger had had to be in the rooms when man-and-woman couples had come in to have the sex with each other (which was just plain gross), he knew that it couldn't possibly feel as good for a grown-up man to put his dickie into one of those smelly things as it was to do a boy in his nice, tight bottom.

Definitely didn't hurt a lady to get it inside her that way, either. For a boy, it really hurt, so boys were braver than women, weren't they?

But the important part – the part that mostly made the good feelings for a girl, the way the tip of a guy's dickie made the good feelings for a boy – was right up front, at the top of her cunny, a little pea-sized dingus called the clitora.

Or was it 'clitorid'? Th' heck with it. Roger would ask Mistress Julia about it later. Right now was for being nice to her, not talking.

The piercings that were held together by that teensy golden padlock were about halfway down the labia flaps. There was no way that they could keep a grow-up from putting his penis into Mistress Julia's cunny, because those loops were made really thin, the metal solid enough to keep its shape, but no more than that. You could probably just break one of them. If you couldn't, one could be ripped right out of that smooth, pretty skin by any guy who really wanted to get his dickie in there, and didn't that thought make you wanna barf?

Poised above Mistress Julia's cunny, slowly kissing that peachfuzz-covered suntanned skin again and again, and breathing in the warm scent of the girl's private zone (not much different from the smell of a boy's middle, really), Roger realized that while it would be hard for a grown-up to get his finger – or fingers – into Mistress Julia's vagina, getting at the clitora wasn't gonna be difficult at all. Taking the girl's hips in his hands, Roger began to use his tonguetip to explore the fold of that little cunny, first below the piercings, sliding his mouth-muscle up to it carefully not to hurt her, then back toward her bunny-hole, figuring that Mr. Chriswell had to have been using his big dickie in that part of Julia since she'd been little.

When he bumped into the base of Mistress Julia's buttplug, it bugged him. That thing had to come out, so – very daring! – Roger lifted up, slid his hands down to below the girl's knees, and bent those strong, athletic legs at the knees and he hips to spread Julia's thighs apart. Forebrow furrowed in thought, Roger still took note of the flush across Mistress Julia's cheeks and the kinda glassy look in her eyes as she lay there, letting him do 'initiative' like Roger couldn't remember having done since the last time he'd slept over at another one of his friends' houses, and they did sex stuff together to the other guy's five-year-old brother.

That kid – his name was Gregory (not 'Greg' but 'Gregory', always) – had just given up completely. Roger had gotten some weird idea that if they'd wanted to tie the little guy up and do torture to him – real torture – Gregory would've just loved every bit of it. 'Passive', they called it. Having two bigger boys working on him at the same time was like the best kind of thing Gregory could possibly imagine.

Here-and-now, that buttplug had to go, so Roger took the base part of it between thumb and forefinger while he used the other hand and forearm on the girl's knees to keep them folded up against her chest. With the skill of personal familiarity, Roger eased the big rubber 'bullet' thing gently but confidently out of the girl's handsome little bottom, really loving the way she groaned and whimpered as the thickest part of it spread her wider from inside before the tapered 'point' made it slide quickly and easily all the way out. Roger was a little bit surprised to see that it wasn't as thick as the ones the DMs had him wearing, even if it was maybe a bit longer.

Well, she was just a girl, right?

Besides, Julia's bottom was for Mr. Chriswell's penis only, and maybe her Master wanted her bottom to be extra-tight whenever he used her for the sex.

Roger put the plug on one of those little trays alongside the bed and then got his hands underneath Mistress Julia's hips, keeping her knees folded as he raised up her bottom and put his face into the cleft between her bottom cheeks. Doing this had grossed Roger out in the indoctrination center, but the first person they'd had him practice on had been Mistress Annalise, and she'd told him that she'd cleansed specially so that her bottom would be squeaky-clean for the poor n00b slaveboy she was gonna help train.

Mistress Annalise had gotten in close to Roger to whisper in his ear: "They didn't tell me to do it, but after the first boy I trained, I just couldn't let you animals stick your tongues in there if I was all dirty inside!"

Then she'd smiled. "So c'mon. Let's see what kind of natural talent we've got to work with."

Mistress Julia – Girlslave Julia – got a grown-up penis inside her bottom all the time. Mr. Chriswell was her owner, and that meant she cleansed just like any other girl sex slave. So her bottom had to be as good-to-go as Roger's was.

And it looks kinda tasty, too!

Bending his neck, Roger checked that out, and it was just the same as any of the boy bunny-holes he'd tasted, neither particularly nice nor even the least bit nasty. It was just another tender place on another person's body you could use to make him – or her – feel sexy, and from the way Mistress Julia gasped and went all shuddery, it was a place where she liked you to pay attention. Good!

Back up into the cunny again as Roger let the girl's bottom down a bit, sliding his tongue into the furrow up to those stupid piercings, then over it to the top part and – there it was! – the clitora, kinda hidden under a little fold of very delicate skin. The whole body underneath him tensed and jerked as Roger outlined the slippery little bit of girlflesh with the tip of his tongue, and he was very proud of doing it so well. You could miss those teensy bitty things so easily.

Remembering Mistress Annalise (who had been really patient with Roger), he settled down to make Mistress Julia's first good feelings build nice and slow.

He figured that this was the way you were supposed to do it if you wanted to make like you loved the girl you were serving.

Not just using his tongue on Julia's very sensitive clitora thingie, Roger paid attention to all of the girl's middle parts, squeezing and kinda slowly massaging her bottom cheeks and stopping the tongue action every now and then to kiss her private zone on one side, the other, and then right over top of where the vee began, letting her feel his lips and his breathing, knowing that she was liking it from the way she sort of quivered when he did it.

Then, of course, back to that clitora.

With Mistress Annalise, Roger had been given the opportunity to think about what he was doing while he did it. That wasn't the way it had been with the lady DMs in the indoctrination center, and he'd been grateful to his confident younger teacher. When you started out slow to suck another boy to his good feelings, you had to judge when to bring up the pace, and by how much. It had been a hard thing to learn, but Roger had gotten pretty good at it before they'd slaved him, and the first time he'd tested what he already knew on somebody other than a boy was with Mistress Annalise. Mostly you had to judge from the way they responded to what you were doing.

Girls weren't as easy to do that with as boys were – at least if Roger could rely on his experiences with Annalise and those two girl sex slaves – but he figured that there were signs in some of them that could help you know when they were getting close.

Mistress Julia, though, got close a heckuva lot quicker than Roger had figured. Suddenly there were strong hands on his head and Roger discovered that Mistress Julia was every bit as much a face-pounder as Jackie Tedesco had ever been, so he just worked the tongue action as best he could and sort of hung on for dear life.

***

Roger did the clitora-tasting twice more, only pausing for a little bit, barely raising his head as he kissed all around Mistress Julia's private zone and only once pushing her knees up to get at her bottom, thinking about how nice it would be if instead of those gels the Masters would use honey to slide a kid's buttplug up in here.

I mean, something this nice really deserved to be all sweet. Maybe chocolate syrup? Nasty color, considering, but awfully good, right?

It wasn't so much that his tongue and his neck was getting tired, but that Roger knew there was something more, something he hadn't tried before with Mistress Annalise and those two slavegirls. Patrolwoman Santiago and some of the lady clients had had Roger doing something called 'finger banging' to them, which meant using your fingertips on the clitora to make the good feelings happen for them.

When the women did it (even Patrolwoman Santiago, who'd even told Roger that she was a 'stone-cold bitch'), they'd mostly always make the slaveboy get alongside and on top of them, and while your hand was doing the finger banging, they'd moosh your face in between – or against – their boobies, either making you use your mouth there or just rubbing you really hard against those titties until you were afraid you were gonna suffocate.

I mean, it might be a great turn-on if you were a baby, but Roger couldn't remember the last time he'd even needed a sippy cup. What was with these grown-up women and their boobies, anyway?

Anyway, Roger crawled up along Mistress Julia's right side, kinda hunching his dickie on her right thigh both because it felt good and to let Mistress Julia know that she made him feel sexy, too, and he slid his left arm underneath her to hold the back of her head as he looked down at her face and gave her some nice kisses.

Mistress Julia looked sort of happy-tired, the way you wanted another boy to be when you were doing the sex to him, but Roger knew that a girl could have the orgasms even more than a boy did before he got too tired out. Even grown-up women could, and wasn't that just disgusting?

He reached up to where he'd put Mistress Julia's plug and dipped his fingers into the little dish of sex gel right next to the tray, then got his hand down on the girl's private zone, slipping his middle fingertip into the top of her vee to make her gasp at the sensation.

"Sorry!" he whispered, knowing that the gel always felt cold at first, but she'd only smiled up at him, not even saying anything. Then he got busy, using only the one finger, and very carefully, realizing that while a grown-up might try to do this for Mistress Julia, only a small-for-his-size kid like Roger could manage this without causing those piercings to hurt her.

Mistress Annalise had taught Roger that a girl's clitora was delicate and lots more sensitive than even the furthest tip of a boy's dickie once you'd skinned back the wrapper, so you didn't have to move your finger much, and you'd better not move it hard. Better to kinda work your whole hand up and down and let the gel slide almost your whole finger up and down in that little valley. Besides, it kinda meant that you were 'petting' the outside part of Mistress Julia's cunny, and Roger figured that she'd like it done that way.

Best of all, this way Roger could look down into Mistress Julia's eyes, and see her expression, and kiss her – which wasn't mushy at all, even on the mouth – while she groaned and whimpered and opened her eyes wide for a second when Roger did the clitora-rubbing just perfect.

Gosh, but she was pretty.

Sure, boys were better for the sex, but for the first time since he'd been taught by Mistress Annalise, Roger could get a handle on why lots of grown-up men liked to do this stuff with girls.

"Boy!" she gasped, kinda lurching as Roger kept doing the finger banging at about the same rate as he could tell her heartbeat was going. "You, you, bad boy!"

Roger was proud that he'd kept himself from giggling.

After all, he wasn't just a little kid anymore.

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