Free A Gentlemen's Agreement by Ashley Zacharias Page A

already did that. Every
entertainment has to be different. We won’t be starving again.” Irene was
careful to use the inclusive pronoun. She wanted the slaves to remember that
she had starved just as much as any of them. In fact, a
little more. She didn’t get any canapés during the entertainment.
    “What are you going to do to us
this time?”
    “I don’t know, yet. I still have
to think of something good.”
    She smiled at Tamarind but didn’t
get a smile in return.
    “You got any ideas?” Irene asked
after a moment.
    “No. You’re the director of
entertainment.”
    “So I better think of something
good before Saturday, or I’ll be in the soup. We’re going to borrow a few more
slaves because there’ll be twenty-one guests and I like to keep the ratio under
three-to-one. I don’t like to see the gentlemen waiting. If they get cranky,
it’ll be bad for all of us.”
    Tamarind nodded at that. She’d
seen cranky gentlemen before and she didn’t like it.
    There were a couple minutes of
silence while Irene thought about her problem. Designing a run-of-the-mill
entertainment – a buffet of slaves – would be easy, but she’d
already set a high bar and was going to have to clear it every time or Lord
Snow would be disappointed.
    “I stole a car,” Tamarind said.
    Irene looked up at her in
surprise.
    “That’s why I was adjudicated into
slavery. I stole a car.”
    Irene frowned. “Was that your
first offense?”
    “Yes.”
    “Someone told me that people don’t
get adjudicated on their first offense. That it wasn’t until their third
conviction that they were considered incorrigible.” That made sense to Irene.
Slavery was a severe punishment. It not only deprived a person of their
freedom, but it condemned them to an early death.
    “It depends on the crime,”
Tamarind said. “If it’s serious enough, a person is adjudicated on her first
offense.”
    “You didn’t injure anyone, did
you? When you stole the car?”
    “No. I didn’t have to do anything
violent. The doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. I hopped in
and started driving. I just wanted a little fun. I took a drive up along the
beach. Waved at my friends. Had a good time. Until the cops
started chasing me. Then I drove down the freeway. I got as far as
Seagate before I ran out of gas.”
    “So running from the police was
why you were adjudicated?”
    “No. I was adjudicated because it
was an earl’s car. A crime against an aristocrat merits adjudication even if
it’s a first offense. I should have known. A commoner would never leave his
keys in the ignition. Aristocrats figure that no one would dare steal their cars
so they’re careless about things like that. I wasn’t thinking. I should have
known. It’s my own fault that I got adjudicated.”
    “How old were you?”
    “Fifteen. The judge could have
shown leniency. Adjudication is automatic for an adult who commits a crime
against an aristocrat but judges have discretion about adjudication for minors.
Judge McCray used his discretion to make me a slave. He said that he wanted to
send a message so he put me on the block.” She smiled. “I got the message. If
the aristocrat had been only a knight, the judge would have let me go. But he
was an earl. Worse, he took the trouble to come and watch the trial. That’s who the message was for. The judge was telling the earl that
he was so important that I had to pay for inconveniencing him by being enslaved
even though I was only fifteen.”
    “That’s terrible.”
    She shrugged. “I thought so. But
it doesn’t matter what a slave thinks, so I stopped worrying about it a long
time ago.”
    “So you’ve been a slave since you
were fifteen?”
    “For almost half my life. I’m
twenty-nine now. I know that because I was sold three months ago. Slaves don’t
get birthday parties, but they get to hear how old they are every time they’re
put on the block. I’ve heard my age announced twenty-three times since