There was no need for Gage to dress up in his armor if he was going to be in Sleeping Beauty Inc.’s tower on Europa. He didn’t need to wear the blindfold either because he was seriously not expecting to run into anyone he knew. His seat for the show was on the bottom level, which was considered the nosebleeds, but that was a silly superstition. All the seats were good.
The stage was a huge glass tube with a helix staircase that spiraled up both sides. There were five donut-shaped viewing rooms. That meant that every model had to walk down five floors worth of stairs and then walk back up them. It was challenging, but the gravity on Europa was less than the gravity on Earth, so it wasn’t quite as taxing, but that was why the places in the top viewing room were the most valuable. From there, you saw the model when she first came out in all her glory, and then you saw her after she had gone down five flights of stairs and come up another five. Sometimes, they were less than pristine on the way up, but if you had seats on the bottom level, you weren’t going to see that.
However, even though Gage was not expecting to see anyone he recognized, it was not all that unusual for people to recognize him. He hated that because he was usually mistaken for someone else. He put on a baseball cap and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. That was enough of a disguise for a place like Brigid on Europa.
Gage didn’t see Iona before she left. They had made their plans together and he had seen her in the dress he brought up for her, but she had tried it on without makeup or having her hair done. She hadn’t allowed him to choose her shoes with her and she’d told him to leave her alone for the last parts of her preparation.
“If I’m doing all this to wow you, I want you to get your first sight of me on the stairs like I’m your little bride.”
“You’ll stop my heart,” he said to her back that was turned toward him.
“What did you say?” she asked, whirling back to him.
“I’ll appreciate the show,” he amended as he left her alone.
After all, he had to change his clothes himself. Okay, he didn’t have to change that much. The addition of the cap and glasses was hardly anything. However, he did need to don a Sleeping Beauty wrist piece in order to gain admittance to the show. He slid it on and felt the metallic feeling that his skin wasn’t thick enough protection to stop the metal of the bracelet from scraping against his bones. It wasn’t a Sleeping Beauty bracelet that had hurt him before. He repeated the fact several times as he laced his boots.
Once he knew Iona had left, he just about left the Cannonball III with half the buttons of his shirt undone. However, he caught himself on the elevator down and did up all of them except the last one.
Gage scanned his bracelet at the entrance to the stage and was deeply surprised when he was directed to the top floor. He was surrounded by crowds who were pushing on him to get through, so he just thought that they must have changed the orientation of the stage. He bet that meant that they were starting the models at the bottom of the stage instead of at the top. In which case, he had better hurry.
Nothing could have surprised him more than when he got to the top floor and the place had obviously been arranged for the super elite.
The first person he recognized was Sherman. He was surrounded by women in red feather dresses like a group of cardinals at a birdfeeder. If his favorite, Jessica, was in the cluster, she wore the same thing as the lesser models.
Gage felt a fresh wave of aversion to the man as he turned away from him, thanking his lucky stars that Iona had avoided being one of the girls who were obviously seeking his approval.
The next person Gage recognized was Dante. If he was at this show, then he had always intended to be here. He would have had to have left Callisto around the same time as Gage and Iona to have made it. He had his three girls surrounding him, but he looked so much less than Sherman that Gage thought that Dante was giving the other man daggers.
Gage didn’t like him either, but he didn’t dislike either of them as much as he disliked the next person he saw.
Olivine.
What was she doing there?
She saw Gage, recognized him, and came over immediately. The first thing he noticed about her was how much surgical work she had done to try to make herself beautiful. In the old days, Olivine had not been ugly, but nor had she been beautiful. She had been an ordinary-looking person whose looks had been enhanced by youth. Her youth was gone. She was approaching sixty and nips and tucks that had been applied to her face were unmistakable. Otherwise, she had blond hair, a very square face, and a figure that had been sucked out with a machine. She wore a black and white striped pantsuit with a no shirt under to show a cut of very artificial cleavage between the lapels. The whole effect was hideous like she had finally embraced her inner mobster, but it may have only looked that way to Gage who knew the beast that lurked within her was several ticks crazier than the most heinous mobster.
“Are you Gage?” she asked, peering at her from over the lace of her red patterned fan. It looked like the surface of Mars, mottled pink like skin that had been slapped too many times.
“Hello, Olivine,” he said, keeping his eyes on her. He was only polite because being rude to her on the top level of a Sleeping Beauty Inc. platform before a show wouldn’t do a thing for anyone.
“I haven’t seen you in decades!” she said with a snap of her fan that matched the unpleasant click of her tongue.
He immediately suspected that the reason he had been given a better ticket to the show was so that Olivine could look at him. Sleeping Beauty Inc. knew that he wouldn’t accept a contract with her, but they weren’t above orchestrating a time and place where she could look at his face if that was what she wanted to pay for. Already, he planned to complain that he hadn’t received a cut. He couldn’t stop one of the worst people in the solar system from looking at him, but he could cause a stink and get some money later.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“You look gorgeous!” she said, eying him in a way that made it seem like she was just as interested in the outside of his body as the inside. How warped had she become over the last forty years? It felt like she was fantasizing about licking his liver.
However, he did look gorgeous. He had spent the last four decades spending as much time in cryostasis so he could outlive her. Only a few more decades to go.
“Are you here to bid on a side piece?” she inquired in a pleasant-sounding voice.
“No. I’m here to watch my mistress walk the stairs.”
Her expression fell flat. “You have a mistress? What an unusual situation! Didn’t you swear that you’d never have another one after you were taken from me?”
Gage pursed his lips and gave her an expression that meant thems-the-brakes.
“Honestly, Gage, if you needed money or help or anything you could have contacted me. I’d be happy to renew your contract,” she said in a voice that grated.
He had never had a contract with her. There was nothing to renew. He had been sold to her father and forced to do every dehumanizing act she could think of. As it was, it was taking all his self-control not to kick the hell out of her on the spot.
He played it out in his mind, watching her head ricochet against the display glass of the stage.
Beyond the first bounce of her head and the blood splatter, the fantasy wasn’t very satisfying. If Sleeping Beauty Inc. was at all liable for his behavior, they’d be forced to give him to her for a lifetime contract. Then he’d never get away from her.
He put his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t take the contract with her because I needed money.”
“Well, then why did you?” Olivine demanded while fluttering her fan impatiently.
“I’m sure you’ll see when she comes out.”
“Are you going to tell me which one she is?”
He smiled.
The show was about to start.
“I haven’t decided yet,” he said, wishing he could look away from Olivine at literally anything else. He had to keep his eyes on her. On her fan, on the tips of her toes, on her tongue, on her eyes, and on her. But what could she do here? Her play for him would not be here beyond her goal to see him and offer him a contract.
He bent his shoulder and tried to relax.
Before Gage saw Olivine, the thing he wanted most for the show was for Iona not to be the opening model on display. He wanted to see a few girls come out in red before she came out.
However, he was not at all surprised when the first woman to take the stairs was Jessica. So she wasn’t with Sherman’s little red birds. Sherman’s girls were delighted to watch her. Her name was displayed on the screen above as she descended the staircase and Sherman’s face betrayed the sorrow he felt at her loss.
“What do you think of her?” Olivine rasped in Gage’s ear.
“She wore a red dress so she wouldn’t piss Sherman off. I think that was probably a pretty good move. She looks appropriately grateful for his patronage.”
“Do you know Sherman?”
“Only that he likes his women in red.”
“Everyone knows that, silly,” Olivine prattled in a hollow tone, elbowing Gage.
Gage didn’t know the next two models, both clad head to foot in red. Cinni came after that and he saw immediately that her theft of the dress had been a hundred percent mandatory. She looked a head and a foot better than the other models. He hoped Sherman would bid on her and forget all about Iona. He hoped everyone forgot about Iona.
But if he thought that, why did he personally dress her?
He shouldn’t have.
And he really knew it as she came down the stairs. The music changed for her from a sputtery dance track to something breezy in its melody. She wore pointed-toe white high heels and as her leg parted the folds of the dress for her to take each downward step, the curve of her calf up to her knee was a kind of delight that was almost painful. A little of her thigh was visible with certain movements and abruptly…
Gage wished he was dead.
He scratched above his eyebrow and thought that he would be dead just from watching her.
The dress did exactly what it was supposed to do. It flared out in a separate piece over her bottom and made the lines of her hips an illusion. It tightened at her waist and made her waist look trimmer than it was. The neckline was a hoop that circled behind her neck with a tiny notch cut in the fabric at her cleavage. The sleeves were so tight that she could barely move her arms, but she didn’t need to move them much as she held the folds of her skirt out of her way like a real princess.
The real victory was the way her hair was styled. It wasn’t styled. It hung in salty beach waves that stuck together in perfect clumps. Her eye makeup was overdone and her dazzling lashes fanned out under her pink fringe. A white feather flower stuck out from the side and her smile was the thing men dreamed about as they fought off lice in trenches.
“I’m going to bid on her,” Olivine announced at Gage’s elbow as she pointed to Iona.
“You’re going to bid on her?” Gage retorted. He was about to ask why, but then he remembered Olivine’s character and he stopped himself from saying more. Her life goal was to find the happiest people and humiliate them until happiness couldn’t find them anymore.
As it was, she hadn’t been punished because of what had happened with him because she hadn’t been the one to buy him. At the end of their time together, she had been an angsty 17-year-old who could denounce anything her family said and get off scot-free. Her father and her uncle went to jail for what they’d done to him and others. She wasn’t included in any of that. She took her family’s huge fortune and continued doing everything she had done before, except under legal contracts.
“Of course, I’m going to bid on her. She’s the finest piece of flesh Sleeping Beauty Inc. has in this backwater spaceport. I’m going to be stranded here for another five years and I need entertainment.”
“This isn’t where you go for that,” Gage began.
Olivine smiled coyly. “If you’re rich enough, it is.”
“Can you outbid Sherman?” Gage wondered out loud.
Olivine’s smile got even bigger. “The question is whether or not he can outbid me.”
Iona went out of sight and Gage was forced to watch the rest of the show at Olivine’s side, hearing about which models she liked.
The silver lining of the event was that toward the end of the show, the girls who had no hope of landing Sherman started waving to Gage as they immediately pegged him as the next most powerful buyer on the first floor. It wasn’t true, but he enjoyed the attention.
“Why aren’t they waving at me?” Olivine wondered.
Gage bit his tongue on the true reason. He didn’t say, ‘I’m a better-looking man than you,’ or ‘If you’re picking your poison, I’m a nicer pick.’ After all, he was simply dressed, but he was always dressed in his muscles, so he always looked good.
Gage left the show thinking that Olivine had learned a lot about what was okay to say in public because she didn’t say anything that made him feel justified in calling the police. Not that the police on Europa were incredibly useful. He felt full to the brim with hate as he boarded the elevator that would take him to the head office executive office of Sleeping Beauty Inc. He was spitting it like fire. If only that woman would die sooner.