Sedition by Alicia Cameron Page A

released from jail. It sounds rather nice—not the Miller System anymore, but the Michaud System. I’m in a position now where I can start over, if I have enough support and insider information, but I also need to find the exact right people. And I need extensive funds to do so. Funding the project entirely on my own makes the results look less legitimate. I need backers, industry stakeholders who lend credibility.”
    “Oliver Torenze?” Sascha asks. I nod. He deserves to know.

    It’s been almost twenty years, but I still remember visiting the re-education centers with Oliver Torenze. He was a close family friend, active in the business, and he had taken me to many work-related events, priming me, even as a teenager, for my future in the family business.
    He also supervised the week when my mother sent me there as punishment.
    “What the hell did I do?” I snapped, glaring at him indignantly as he ordered two of the guards to hold me while another beat me. “I’ve done everything you told me to since you brought me here!”
    My requests were met with silence, then another sharp slapping noise as the leather made contact with my skin. I tried not to cry out, not to add to the wails of the Demoted who surrounded me.
    “You’re still fighting,” Oliver commented, a slight smile on his face. I couldn’t tell if he was proud or disappointed. “Another dozen.”
    He never held the strap himself, but he ordered it to be used, and he watched while it was. He held back the food I wasn’t allowed and he ordered the restraints that forced me into painful positions on the cold concrete floor that reeked of blood and bodily fluids, even through the stench of disinfectant. While I cried and screamed, he supervised and smiled. The guards were the ones who hit me, but he was the one who leaned in and whispered threats in my ear when I was so sleep deprived that I was hallucinating.
    Oliver was acting on my mother’s orders, but he embraced my torture happily. He had been told to make an impression on me and he did.
    I realized that there were no lengths he wouldn’t go to in order to succeed.

Chapter 6
Partnership
    It makes sense all of a sudden. The insistence on decorum, the mingling at slaveholder events. Me. I had tried to justify it by telling myself that my master was keeping up appearances, that he was working on his current research project, but that was never enough. It never explained why he was so harsh, why he demanded so much of me, or why he was so uncomfortable around certain people.
    “I take it Torenze is more than just a wealthy business man?” I ask.
    “Yes,” Cash explains. “He was once my mother’s closest business associate and family friend. He trained me, I used to confide in him; he was my inside connection in the business. He was there when I slipped and exposed my plans. After everything happened, I didn’t think I’d see him again, but my mother fired him. Word is that he wanted more control than she was allowing him, so she cut him loose. When he started his own business, the acquisition of his business was one of my new company’s top goals.”
    “But you want him on your side for more than official business. Why is he so cruel to you? He’s constantly cutting you down, threatening you—” I think of all the hints at Cash’s family. “He threatens to expose you! Why would you want him working with you?”
    Cash smiles. “Torenze was to be my other half at one point; I was going to handle advertising and research and development, he was going to handle the practical side. He enjoyed that sort of thing. He was my mentor, for a while, it’s so hard to believe that now. But then I stumbled upon this other research—you know, when I first started it, I thought it would be welcomed, applauded. It was only after the fact that I realized how ignorant that was. As it stands, the Demoted system isn’t about efficiency or success. It’s about brutality.”
    I nod. I’ve always