The Auction by Kitty Thomas

I never worried too much about the auction. It was what happened to other girls. The ones who didn’t have someone with pockets deep enough to set them free.
    The city officials didn’t care what happened afterward. You could keep the woman you bought, or give her away or sell her or set her free. As long as enough wealth had been redistributed back into the city’s coffers, that was all they cared about.
    I wasn’t particularly rich, but I was wise enough to make friends with those who were. My parents had died out there, that place that was outside the city and forbidden. Supposedly they were killed by the monsters.
    By the time I was sixteen I was giving Stephen Thurman—among others—blow jobs behind the learning center. He was part of the richest family in the city and three years my senior. I’d hedged my bets with others but focused most of my attention on him. He was the only one who had his own money and wouldn’t be dependent on a loan from his father. He’d promised to buy me and then let me go.
    I’d made it my primary occupation since the death of my parents to be as surly and disagreeable as possible. I think in the back of my mind I believed this would make me an undesirable on the auction block. Stephen could buy me quickly for little money, and then it would be over. Life would return to normal.
    Thinking back, it’s amazing the lengths I was willing to go to to orchestrate my freedom and avoid enslavement. But really I’d been a slave even before the auction. The thing I had most tried to prevent, I’d lived it for two years to stay in Stephen’s good graces.
    The day I was sold was a bright, warm day. I stood with ten other girls who’d just turned eighteen. We were fair, thin—but not too thin, with long hair in curled ringlets. We wore a ring of local purple flowers in our hair and white gowns like ancient virgins about to be tossed into a volcano.
    A deep and ominous drum sounded in the distance as we were marched around the side of the hill to the platform at the very edge of the city. The local officials called us a batch, as if we were sweet cakes or a grouping of widgets. Sweet young women all in a row. Wind them up and set them to do your bidding.
    As the procession continued, we moved in a somber line; no one tried to run. I wondered if the temptation screamed in their minds as it did mine. The officials didn’t chain us because there was no point. There was only one civilized place on the whole planet, and we were living in it. Outside the city, you were as good as dead. The monsters lived out there. So if the city said: “Slavery, yes, we like it!”, you nodded and smiled and then lowered your head like a good girl.
    When our people left the source planet over a century ago, they brought with them our past in hundreds of dusty rectangular chunks called books. I was told these books were history but they felt like fiction.
    Even so, I read as much as I could about everything from our past before the relocation: plants, animals, technology, culture. Much of the technology they spoke of, we’d somehow lost. Perhaps we didn’t have enough people whose minds were turned toward invention on our ship. There had been a time deep in our history when we’d used computerized books, but now we were relegated to scrolls.
    The auction was ridiculous and demeaning, but it wasn’t far removed from photographs I’d seen of what were called debutante balls on Earth. At those functions, the women had been in white gowns, with an escort on their arm. They’d been on display and presented to society, and no one had thought it odd or offensive.
    The first girl was led up to the center block and spun in a slow circle. Her name was Lizbeth, the richest and snottiest girl in the city. I secretly hoped she’d end up enslaved to some strangely rich ruffian, living in a cave out in the wild somewhere—not that our people lived that far from the protection of the city. Of course that wouldn’t