Chapter 1: The Price of Flesh and Firearms
The first thing that hit him was the smell. It wasn’t just the hot, sour stench of unwashed bodies pressed too close, though that was there. It was the smell of dust and animal shit from the street, of rotting vegetables in the gutter, and underneath it all, a metallic, rusty scent he couldn’t place until he saw the manacles. Iron. The air itself felt thick, a physical weight on his skin. It was nothing like the simulation.
Marshall Pinkney blinked against the sudden, shocking glare of a sun that felt too large and too close. A sharp shove between his shoulder blades sent him stumbling forward, the rough hemp of a rope biting into the raw skin of his neck. A man in a sweat-stained linen shirt yanked the rope, hard, and Marshall’s training screamed at him to break the man’s wrist, to pivot and disarm and run.
But he didn’t.
He let himself be pulled, his eyes cataloging everything: the mud-rutted street, the wooden buildings with their peeling paint, the crowd of people all dressed in shades of brown and gray and dirty white. And the faces. All white. His stomach turned to ice.
“Move, merchandise,” the man grunted, his breath sour with cheap tobacco.
Merchandise. The word echoed in the silent, analytical part of his brain even as his heart hammered against his ribs. The time device had worked. The calibration was off by decades, maybe a century, but it had worked. He was here. 1800-something. And he was very, very black.
They dragged him up three warped wooden steps onto a sun-bleached platform. The planks were worn smooth in patches, stained dark in others. He didn’t let himself think about what had made those stains. The crowd below coalesced into individual faces, mostly men, their expressions a mix of boredom, sharp assessment, and a hungry kind of curiosity that made his skin crawl. He stood there, the rope still around his neck, dressed only in the loose canvas trousers they’d given him after stripping him of his synth-fiber jacket and boots. The air was hot on his bare chest and back.
A man in a finer coat, with a face like a clenched fist, stepped forward and took the rope. This one had a belly that strained his waistcoat and small, pitiless eyes. The auctioneer.
“Fine, sound buck here!” the man bawled, his voice cutting through the murmuring tide of the crowd. “Prime field hand or house nigger potential. Look at those shoulders.” He brought a short cane up and prodded Marshall hard in the pectoral muscle. Marshall didn’t flinch. He stared straight over the heads of the crowd, his face a mask of blank submission. Inside, he was mapping exits, calculating the weight distribution of the auctioneer’s body, the drop off the back of the platform.
“Got all his teeth. No visible defects. Strong back. We’ll start the bidding at three hundred.”
A wave of noise rolled over him. Numbers barked into the heavy air. Three twenty. Three fifty. Four hundred. The voices were disembodied, casual. He felt like a horse. He felt less than a horse.
Then his gaze, scanning the periphery, caught and stuck. A woman. She was seated under a faded canvas awning off to the side of the square, on a chair someone had brought out from one of the buildings. She was young, dressed in a gown of pale lavender that seemed to glow against the drab surroundings. Her face was shaded by a wide-brimmed hat, but he could see the perfect line of her nose, the downturned curve of her mouth. Boredom etched into her delicate features. Boredom, and a faint, unthinking disgust.
Next to her stood a large man. Late forties, broad in a way that spoke of power, not softness. His suit was dark and expensive. His hands, resting on the head of a cane, were thick-fingered, strong. Massa Thornton. The name popped into Marshall’s head from the briefing files he’d studied, the parameters of the test. A primary target profile. A slaver with significant holdings.
The auctioneer’s cane tapped his ribs again. “Focus, boy. Let ‘em see you.” He grabbed Marshall’s jaw and forced his head to turn, to face the crowd fully.
As his head turned, the woman under the awning—Eliza—looked up. Her eyes met his. The boredom didn’t vanish, but it changed. It sharpened. Her gaze drifted from his face, down the line of his neck, over the defined muscles of his chest and abdomen, then back up. It wasn’t the assessing look of a buyer evaluating livestock. It was slower. It was personal. A faint pink tinged her cheeks. She didn’t look away.
“Four hundred and twenty!”
The shout came from Thornton. He hadn’t even looked at Marshall directly. He was adjusting his cuff, speaking to the air beside him.
“Four-fifty,” came another voice.
Thornton waved a dismissive hand. “Five hundred.”
A silence fell over the crowd. The auctioneer grinned, a gap-toothed yellow smile. “Going once at five hundred dollars for this prime piece of property! Going twice…”
Marshall kept his eyes on Eliza. She was watching him, her lips slightly parted now. She held a small fan but had forgotten to use it. When the auctioneer brought his cane down with a crack on the wooden rail, shouting “Sold!”, she flinched, as if startled from a dream. Her eyes widened. For a second, something like fear flickered in them. Then her husband, Thornton, turned and said something to her. She nodded, her face closing down again into its pretty, placid mask.
Marshall was pulled from the block. The rope was exchanged for cold, heavy iron cuffs fastened around his wrists. The man who had first brought him there leered. “Lucky nigger. Going to Thornton’s place. He works ‘em hard, but he feeds ‘em. Sometimes.” He laughed, a short, barking sound with no humor in it.
The journey was a blur of jolting wagon, dust, and the ache of the manacles. They arrived as the sun was bleeding orange into the horizon. The plantation was vast, the big white house sitting on a hill like a crown, surrounded by a sea of green fields dotted with the bent backs of laborers. The barn they shoved him into was cavernous, smelling of hay, horse sweat, and old wood. They locked his cuffs to a chain looped around a thick support beam.
“Massa’ll be down to inspect his purchase directly,” the overseer sneered, before spitting into the hay and leaving.
Alone, Marshall finally moved. His quiet demeanor evaporated. His hands, large and capable, explored the area within his reach. His fingers found a loose, heavy nail head in the post behind him. He worked it silently, methodically, the muscles in his forearms corded with strain. After ten minutes of concentrated effort, it came free. He palmed it, a cold, rough shard of potential.
Then he settled back, the picture of resigned fatigue. He closed his eyes, slowing his breathing, listening. He heard the crickets start up, the distant lowing of a cow, the muffled sound of voices from the big house. And then, heavier footsteps, approaching.
The barn door creaked open. Massa Thornton filled the doorway, a silhouette against the twilight. He entered, followed by the overseer. Thornton carried a lantern, which he held up, throwing swaying, monstrous shadows against the walls. The light washed over Marshall, chained and shirtless in the hay.
“Stand up,” Thornton said. His voice was deep, accustomed to obedience.
Marshall stood.
Thornton walked a slow circle around him, the lantern held out. “Look at that, John,” he said to the overseer. “Perfect conformation. Like a damn thoroughbred.” The light stopped on the cross-hatching of old, faint scars on Marshall’s back—training injuries from another time. “Some marks. Whipped before, but trained out of whatever foolishness caused it. Good.”
He stopped in front of Marshall, so close Marshall could smell the brandy on his breath, the lavender pomade in his hair. Thornton’s eyes were like chips of flint. “You belong to me now. Your body, your strength, your breath. You do what you’re told, when you’re told it. You look down, you say ‘sir,’ you work until I tell you to stop. You understand?”
Marshall lowered his gaze to the man’s polished boots. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled, letting the accent of the place flatten his words.
“Louder.”
“Yes, sir.”
Thornton grunted, seemingly satisfied. He turned to the overseer. “We’ll start him in the north field tomorrow. See how he—”
A soft rustle at the door interrupted him. Eliza stood there, one hand on the frame. She wore a shawl over her lavender dress now. In the lantern light, her face was all wide eyes and soft shadows.
“Husband?” she said, her voice a hesitant melody. “I heard the noise…”
“It’s nothing, my dear,” Thornton said, his tone shifting to a performative gentleness. “Just inspecting the new nigger. Ensuring he’s sound.”
Her eyes drifted past her husband, past the overseer, and found Marshall again. They traveled over him, chained and exposed in the golden lamplight. There was no boredom in her look now. It was pure, focused fascination. She bit her lower lip, a quick, nervous gesture.
“He seems… very strong,” she said, almost to herself.
“That’s the point, Eliza,” Thornton chuckled, a dry, unpleasant sound. He missed the nuance in her observation entirely. He placed a possessive hand on her shoulder, turning her gently but firmly away from the doorway. “Back to the house. This is no place for you.”
She allowed herself to be turned, but her glance back over her shoulder was long and lingering. Then she was gone, a whisper of silk and perfume in the hay-scented dark.
Thornton watched her go, then turned back to the overseer, his mind already on other things. “As I said, John. North field at dawn. Don’t go easy on him.”
“Yes, Massa Thornton.”
The two men walked out, taking the lantern’s light with them. The barn was plunged into a deep blue gloom, lit only by the sliver of moonlight through the high window.
Marshall stood in the darkness, the cold iron of the manacles around his wrists. He didn’t move for a full minute, listening to the footsteps fade away. Then, slowly, a small, cold smile touched his lips. His modern mind, his 21st-century mind, clicked into a serene, deadly calculus.
With deliberate, silent movements, he knelt in the hay. He brushed aside the loose strands where he had been sitting. His fingers closed around a hard, polymer grip. He pulled it free.
The Glock 19, matte black and impossibly anachronistic, felt like an old friend in his hand. He’d wedged it into a gap in the floorboards the moment they’d left him alone. He checked the magazine by feel. Full. One in the chamber.
He looked toward the empty doorway where Eliza had stood, where the cruelty of her husband had been so casually displayed. He ran a thumb over the serrated grip of the pistol.
He spoke softly, to the darkness, to the past, to the future he was now going to dismantle.
“Inspection’s over, Massa,” he whispered. “My turn.”
The heavy manacles were a problem. A simple, brutish, 19th-century problem. Marshall grinned in the dark. He’d faced worse in virtual sims with decaying integrity fields. He knelt again, his fingers finding the loose nail he’d worked free earlier.
He inserted the thick point into the keyhole of the cuffs, closed his eyes, and focused on the feel of the internal mechanism. It was a simple warded lock, crude by any modern standard. He wiggled, applied pressure, listened for the faintest click. A few seconds of concentrated manipulation, and the first cuff sprang open with a dull clunk. The second one followed shortly after.
He massaged his wrists, the skin raw and angry. Then he reached back into the hay where the Glock lay. His hand closed around the cool, familiar polymer. A wave of calm, of pure rightness, washed over him. This was a tool from his world. A great equalizer.
From a small, sealed compartment in the grip, he retrieved the threaded sound suppressor. He spun it onto the barrel with practiced ease, the metallic whisper lost in the night sounds of the barn. He chambered a round with a soft shuck-clack.
He smiled. He didn’t need to grab any attention. Not yet.
But then he thought. The wife. Eliza. Her hungry gaze on the auction block, her lingering presence in the barn doorway. She was a variable. An opportunity. Trapped, bored, neglected. She lived in the big house. She had access. She had reasons to hate her husband. Getting to Thornton would be easier with an ally on the inside. A distraction. Or better, an accomplice.
He needed to get her on his side first.
And the only way to do that, to shatter the porcelain doll her world had made her, to forge a bond that her society could never comprehend or forgive… was to fuck the shit out of her. To give her a taste of a different kind of power. To make her complicit in a way that was irreversible.
But how? Getting her away from Massa without suspicion was the issue. He was a new slave, chained in a barn. She was the lady of the house. He had no help here, no network.
He stared at the pale sliver of moonlight cutting across the dusty floor. An idea formed. Not just an idea—the perfect, foolproof solution. It relied on human nature. On greed, on fear, on the hierarchies of this hellscape. And it would work perfectly.
He moved to the barn door, peering out through a crack. The overseer, John, was leaning against a fence post about fifty yards away, chewing tobacco and staring at the big house, a dark silhouette against the softer dark of the night. He was waiting, probably, for Thornton to retire so he could lock up and go to his own shack.
Marshall took a deep breath. He slipped the silenced Glock into the back waistband of his rough trousers. He picked up a decent-sized stone from the barn floor. Then, he opened the barn door just wide enough to slip out, moving with a predator’s silence across the packed dirt yard.
He came up behind John, the man none the wiser, lost in his own bitter thoughts. Marshall pressed the cold muzzle of the silencer against the back of the overseer’s neck.
“Don’t turn around,” Marshall said, his voice low, calm, utterly different from the mumbled “yes sir” he’d used before. “Make a sound, and I paint the fence with your brains.”
John froze, a thick glob of tobacco juice dripping from his lip onto his shirt. “Wha—?”
“The key to my chains. Now.”
“You ain’t got no gun, nigger,” John whispered, a tremor of bravado in his voice.
Marshall pressed the muzzle harder, digging it into the nerve just under the skull. “Wanna bet your spinal cord on that? The key.”
A shaky hand went into a pocket, fumbled, and produced a small iron key. Marshall took it.
“Good. Now listen, because your life depends on it. You’re going to go up to the big house. You’re going to ask to speak to Missus Thornton. Just her. You tell her… the new buck is sick. Thrashes something awful. You think it’s the fits, maybe catching. You’re worried it’ll spread to the other stock. But you don’t want to bother the Master over something a nigger doctor should see.”
“She ain’t gonna come,” John hissed.
“She will. You’ll see it in her eyes. She’ll come. You will bring her down here yourself. Then you will stand guard right outside that barn door. You will let no one else in. Not the Master, not anyone. If anyone approaches, you cough. Loud. You understand me?”
“He finds out, he’ll skin us both!”
“He won’t find out. Because if you do this right, I let you live. You get to keep your job. You get to tell the Master tomorrow the nigger doctor gave me some medicine and I’m fine. You screw this up…” Marshall leaned closer, his breath in the man’s ear. “I don’t need a gun to kill you, John. I know seventeen ways to break your neck with my bare hands before you hit the ground. The gun is just for convenience. Now move.”
He stepped back, tucking the Glock away but keeping his hand near it. John turned slowly, his face pale in the moonlight, eyes wide with a new kind of fear. This wasn’t the fear of a disobedient slave; this was the fear of a man who’d just stared into the eyes of something utterly alien and predatory. He nodded, once, sharply.
“Good man,” Marshall said, a cold smile playing on his lips. “Go on. Sell it.”
John stumbled slightly as he walked toward the big house, his shoulders hunched. Marshall melted back into the shadows of the barn, leaving the door slightly ajar. He moved the manacles, placing them loosely around the post so they’d look still locked from a distance. He lay back down in the hay, arranging himself to look feverish, distressed.
He waited. The cicadas screamed. A dog barked far off. His heart beat a steady, slow rhythm. This was the gamble. On her curiosity. On her boredom. On the flicker he’d seen in her eyes.
Minutes passed. Then, the soft crunch of footsteps on the path. Two sets. One heavy and reluctant—John. The other lighter, quicker.
He heard John’s voice, unnaturally loud at the door. “He’s in here, Missus Thornton. Just… be careful. He’s out of his head.”
The barn door pushed open wider. Lantern light spilled in, held by Eliza Thornton. She stood there, wrapped in a shawl over her nightdress, her hair loose around her shoulders. Her face was a mask of cautious concern, the good mistress checking on the livestock.
“John said you were taken ill,” she said, her voice quiet.
Marshall groaned, rolling his head in the hay.
“Wait outside, John,” she said, not taking her eyes off Marshall. “Keep watch.”
“Yes’m,” John mumbled, and the door shut, leaving them in the lantern’s golden pool.
Eliza took a step closer. “What is wrong with you?”
Marshall sat up slowly, the feigned sickness falling away from his posture like a discarded cloak. He looked at her, no submission in his gaze now. Only intense, focused calculation.
“Nothing’s wrong with me, Eliza,” he said, his voice clear and strong.
She startled, taking a half-step back, the lantern swinging. “You… you address me as—”
“I’m not from here,” he interrupted, standing in one smooth, powerful motion. He kicked the manacles aside with a clatter. Her eyes went wide, darting from his face to the discarded irons and back. “I’m from a long, long way from here. And I’m not sick. I needed to talk to you. Alone.”
“This is a trick,” she breathed, but she didn’t call for John. She didn’t run. The lantern trembled in her hand. “John said you were violent.”
“John understands the new chain of command,” Marshall said, taking a step toward her. He was close enough now to see the rapid flutter of her pulse in her throat, to smell the lavender and soap on her skin. “He works for me now. Just like your husband is going to.”
“You’re mad,” she whispered, but it was unconvincing. There was a thrilling horror in her eyes. An awakening.
“Am I?” He reached out, not touching her, but his hand hovered near the lantern. “You looked at me today. On that block. You looked at me like you’ve never looked at anything in your whole… gilded cage of a life.”
Her breath hitched. She said nothing.
“Your husband is a cruel, small man,” Marshall continued, his voice dropping to a low, intimate rumble. “He owns people. He owns you. You’re just better-dressed property. Don’t you ever want to break something, Eliza? Starting with the rules?”
Tears, sudden and shocking, welled in her eyes. They weren’t tears of fear. They were tears of recognition. Of a truth unnamed finally given voice.
“What are you?” she asked, the question a fragile thing in the quiet barn.
“I’m the future,” he said. Then he closed the distance between them. His hand came up and gently took the lantern from her limp grip. He set it on a barrel beside them, the light now casting their shadows, giant and intertwined, against the far wall.
He looked down at her. “And tonight,” he said, his voice a dark promise, “I’m yours. If you’re brave enough.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He cupped the back of her neck, his fingers tangling in her soft hair, and brought his mouth down on hers.