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Page 3.

Mélu's contract employer, Wan Industries, was one of the world's most powerful aircraft manufacturers. She'd met the billionaire, Wan Hong, on her first day during a presentation about the project. She would be here for thirty days at most, after completing a documentation subset for the new China Air Transport liner capable of carrying nearly 1,000 passengers. Then she'd be back home in Luxembourg, watering her roses in a tiny garden behind the tidy little white bungalow she shared with her young husband, Romain.

Hearing a woman's desperate shriek, Mélu set her tools aside and rose. She was an athletic, modest woman who regularly jogged, played tennis, bicycled, and more. Her features were pretty in a plain, healthy sort of way that made men drool—except she was happily married to a handsome young man with whom she shared love and affection. She had a level-headed air about her. She wore a black blouse and a black skirt that came to just above rounded knees, hinting at strong, rounded thighs under the garment. Her skin was caramel-tanned from the Shanghai sun. She wore simple black loafers.

She heard more noises.

Running.

Curious, she walked across her small patio and leaned her elbows on the wooden fence, overlooking the concrete walking path, hedges, and sprawling green gardens of Wan's estate.

Running toward her was a terrified looking blonde woman clutching a white, terry beach towel around herself. She was barefoot, terrified, and slapping the concrete with her feet.

"Are you all right?" Mélu asked, extending her lightly fuzzed arms over the fence so that her silver link bracelet swayed on one wrist. Her nails were bright pink. When she took a break from her work, she liked to sand her nails, touch them up, blow on them, regard them. Right now, she was regarding the blonde with concern.

"Help me," the woman cried.

She's young, Mélu thought—maybe 25 at most, and certainly not from around here.

"Come in," Mélu said automatically, opening the wooden gate.

The woman scrambled into the patio area, nearly collapsing on giraffe legs. She was beautiful, with blue eyes, creamy skin tinted a finer caramel shade than Mélu's, and her long golden hair done up in a bun on the back of her neck, but coming undone in an ungainly bouncing tangle.

Mélu heard the sounds of men running, yelling, and cursing. She heard the powerful, ominous pounding of their feet on concrete walks and wooden bridges. They would be here in seconds.

No time to waste.

Mélu slid open the glass door, pushed her inside, and swung her own behind around the door frame while pulling the door shut. Hiding behind industrial lace shades, Mélu watched. Her dark brown eyes were wide as she stared at three Triad or Yakuza gangsters running past. Their torsos were bare and rippled with muscle like steely cables. Each of the men had long, flowing black hair and was covered with garish tattoos: dragons, ghosts, gangsters, flowers, swords, and of course plenty of delicately drawn female skin. She heard them curse as they huffed and puffed jogging past.

Mélu locked the door, turned, and rested her back against the slider. She said in Luxembourgeois-accented English, "You are safe with me."

holding the towel around herself as best she could, for modesty, the young woman looked up through swollen, tear-reddened eyes. "Thanks."

"You sound American."

"My name," she said between sobs, "is Hannah Smith. I'm from San Diego and I don't want to be here anymore."

Mélu extended her hand. "Come, let's go to the bathroom and wash your face. I'll make some nice tea, and we can talk." Her voice was dry, authoritative, and strong, like a teacher's. "You are a BAN?"

The girl nodded emphatically, with a sob. "It's considered so hip. People are intrigued about BDSM and sex slaves. They think it's cool somehow. The money is really appealing because we all live in so much poverty these days. But it's just sex trafficking by another name. Once you get in with these animals, you never get out."

The young woman sounded intelligent, Mélu thought. She wouldn't ask about college, because there was no chance the girl had any advanced education. The U.S. corporate universities scam had collapsed after driving millions of hopeful young people into phony education programs, with zillions of dollars in student loan debt that only enriched the zillionaire class more, and no hope of ever paying the debt off because all the jobs had been outsourced to cheaper markets—including the contract artisan class who were educated programmers, accountants, and other intellectual workers hired strictly as temps. Talk about indentured servitude, Mélu thought as she prepared some nice tea and cookies for the two of them. Poor girl.

Hannah Smith was a bit taller than Mélu, and walked on long, slender legs as pale as ivory. You could see tiny traces of blue capillaries, so fine was her skin. Mélu got the picture totally. This woman from California was a BAN—the new kind of indentured servant or contract slave, euphemistically called Butlers And Nannies. In reality, when Asian, African, and South American billionaires bought themselves the pick of these snowy, desperate flowers from the decaying, collapsing West, they had other things in mind. And sometimes they shared their property with their footmen and killers. It was like tossing a bone to your dogs in the baronial manor.

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