FOUR NIGHTS LATER

Sara thought she might be able to settle into a routine, given enough time, but it was going to take awhile. She had known getting through this first night would be hard, and she hadn't even specifically foreseen some of the worst parts. She had prepared herself, as well as she could, for working in a roomful of unknown men, catching occasional stares at her body (except for Cherise's, Sara suspected they were finding hers the most stareworthy, for reasons different from Cherise's), and knowing she wasn't aware of all of them, with so many of them directed, she was sure, at her backside. But she somehow hadn't stopped to think how much more intensely self-conscious she would be whenever she bent over a table to wipe it down. At such times, she was sure her butt was attracting even more attention, as well as her breasts, which hung down over the table and swayed as she wiped.

And there were so many times that her whole perception of the scene around her took on an intense and unpleasant dreamlike feel, which she was sure was because it reminded her, again and again, of those dreams in which she was performing some mundane, very public task, such as shopping in a crowded grocery store, only to realize suddenly that she had forgotten to put any clothes on. Tonight Sara was feeling those same flashes of shame and embarrassment she felt in the dreams. The feeling was intensified by the fact that the place was just the same, in a number of ways, as any other restaurant she had ever been in, so that this really could have been one of those dreams -- Bart and the staff had worked hard at reproducing the basic experience.

There were differences, of course, and not just that the clientele consisted entirely of men. The customers were boisterous, though generally in a good-spirited kind of way, so it was more like a sports bar than a normal restaurant, increasingly so as the night wore on and more beer and wine was consumed. All around her Sara could hear the interns taking orders and watch them deliver them, occasionally explaining the nature of various dishes to the customers, either because the customer was new or the dish was (the menu included two new combinations not offered last year, in place of two that had proved unpopular). The waitresses were all doing an excellent job, while retaining a respectful attitude and calling everyone "Sir" in every response. Bart and Derek had trained them very well. There had been only one incident, so far, of a customer pinching or fondling (Sara wasn't sure which) a waitress' butt (it was Ashley's), and Sid the bouncer, not visibly present but watching for obvious events or waitress' signals through a small viewhole, had come in and told the man his evening at the restaurant was over (reminding him "Don't touch our slaves"). Sara had felt very tense for a time after that, but nothing else remarkable had followed.

Three things made it easier for Sara to get through the night. One was that her job didn't require her to speak to anyone. That in itself was always a relief, but was especially fortunate given the second thing on the "list of things that made it easier": that Cherise was on duty (five waitresses would alternate nights with the other five). Cherise's presence would always buoy Sara up through any amount of distress, even though it also resulted in Sara being unable to get a word out at all. The third thing was the knowledge that as local men saw Sara and became familiar with her, that helped make her upcoming roast that much more special.

Sara watched now as Katie delivered an appetizer plate of breaded fried fingers and toes, while Cheryl brought out the orders for a table of two: one order consisted of girlmeat steak garnished with diced green onions and gravy, a baked potato, open and covered with same, and a salad with ranch dressing, a side order that had proven unexpectedly popular the year before; the other order was a bowl of girlmeat stew with a side of garlic bread. Every dish on the menu was built around girlmeat -- to the island men simply "meat," as they didn't know any other kind.

It was uncomfortably warm inside the dining room -- the entire building actually. Air conditioning had been judged not only to use too much electricity, but also to be too noisy, so there was none, though there were wind-powered ceiling fans. But Sara found that the heat, though unpleasant, was actually a good thing. With Cherise spending so much time in Sara's sight, Sara had no control over the powerful sexual arousal that set her crotch buzzing -- and leaking. But her job kept her so active that she was drenched in sweat, her skin shining in reflected light that made the cuts of her muscles more noticeable and surely brought her still more attention than otherwise -- yet the sweat did her the useful service of making invisible the other fluids dribbling down her inner thighs. Since she wasn't needed every second, there were plenty of opportunities to take breaks to drink water that included added electrolytes, so she, along with the other waitresses, was able to hold off heat exhaustion.

Sara, now finishing a mug of water, saw two men from one of the tables leave the room. Sighing, knowing she was about to have to bend over again, she went over to wipe down the table.

Sara could barely keep her eyes open when the dining room finally closed for the night, but she absolutely had to shower before going to bed. The girls' shower room had four shower heads, two pairs on opposite sides, but it managed to accommodate all six of the girls who'd worked tonight, as they took turns standing under the streams, soaping up while waiting.

Sara wasn't sure she'd ever be able to turn off the faucet between her legs, as she watched Cherise tiredly soaping her breasts and tummy. She wished so hard that Cherise would look at her and say, "I'm so exhausted, Sara, would you wash me?"

Katie looked around as she toweled off and said, in an irritated voice, "No blow dryers." Cheryl responded, "Uhhh, what was it you thought you needed one for, Katie?", making them all laugh -- it just seemed so automatic to think of blow-drying following a shower that it was difficult to remember that there was no reason to use one on their brush-cut hair.

Sara felt a little gloomy looking ahead to tomorrow night, when there would be no Cherise in the dining room, for her to watch and make the time go faster. Luckily Sara's own job required essentially no thought, so she'd be free to lose herself in reveries about Cherise.

Sara finally stumbled her way back to the storeroom, only to find that Wendy was still there, organizing the "receipts." Customers paid for their meals by barter, some bringing lengths of girlskin leather, some bringing a box or two of peaches, some with other farm products. There was no set price for a meal, but each man brought what he thought was fair to the storeroom door and handed it over to Wendy or Karen, receiving in return a chit from Derek, which the man would then take to the front door for entrance to the dining room. Wendy was finishing up stacking and labeling boxes of non-food items, while Karen was delivering edibles to the kitchen for refrigeration, freezing, or just storage.

Wendy looked up at Sara and smiled. "Almost done. I'll just be another minute."

Sara gave her a don't-worry-about-it wave. "I'm just going to flop down on the bed. When you're done, could you turn down the light to the lowest level? Not off, just down."

"Sure. Night."

After Wendy had gone, Sara's hand sleepwalked on its own down to her crotch and began rubbing eagerly. Soon Sara was wide awake, feeling the thrill coursing through her, and silently mouthing the name "Cherise!"

THREE DAYS LATER

Sara had been attending the classes Cherise was taking, two sociology and one psychology, and they really turned out to be pretty interesting. The one this morning was about Purity Island society and why it had developed in the directions it had. Sara didn't bother taking notes, but she still managed to listen when not playing with fantasies about Cherise in her head.

But class was over now, Cherise was in her own room doing homework, and Sara was bored. She'd finished her daily workout -- the situps, pushups (she was trying out a new form to work out new muscles, doing the pushups with knees down and arms spread wide apart), chinups using the molding at the top of the doorframe for fingerholds, bench presses using a box full of girlskins, making up for its low weight by increasing repetitions, and running in place for twenty minutes -- she was still working on finding a way to make less noise doing it. She had gone to the library -- really just a closet with books in it -- to see if there was anything interesting. She found one she thought she might like: a period novel, set two centuries in the past, in which a young planter and one of his slaves fall passionately in love, defying the standards of the time. Sara had seen the movie, and wondered whether the book did a better job of explaining the chemistry between the two main characters. As she reached for it, Trish came up behind her, startling her.

Trish apologized immediately, and then gave Sara a suspiciously nervous smile. "Jill is off studying with Ashley and Cherise, for that sosh class she's in." Jill and Trish were sharing a room. "I'm not in the same class, so I was deciding what to do, and I thought... I might get to know you a little better." She reached forward and put her hand on Sara's forearm, then slid it downward, in what seemed to Sara a very sensual way, until her index finger was hooked playfully around Sara's.

Only a complete idiot would have failed to understand what "getting to know Sara better" was meant to consist of. Sara had known this would happen occasionally, with a group of college girls sharing a small space together for months. She had thought ahead about what to do about it, and hoped the result would work without offending anyone. She smiled. "I'm f... f... flattered, honest. But I j... just... It's n... n... not you, it's absolutely not you! It's me. Y... Y... You understand?" It was true that, in any universe not including Cherise -- and what a miserable, empty place such a universe would be! -- Sara would have been eager to try out a little sexual play with Trish.

That Sara hadn't hooked up with any of the other girls probably made her gentle rejection more believable. Trish, Sara hoped, was concluding that Sara was exclusively hetero. To Sara's relief, Trish turned her disappointed expression into a playful pout. "Well, okay."

Sara looked into her eyes intently. "Still f... f... friends?" She held her arms out.

Trish gave her a genuine-looking smile and completed the hug. "Of course." She let go, smiled again, and said, "See you tonight, then." Trish was on waitress duty tonight.

Sara nodded and smiled. "Sure." Trish left, and Sara retrieved the book. She decided the encounter may actually have been helpful. Word would probably go around about Sara's supposed sexual preferences, and the number of future occasions of the other girls hitting on her might be reduced, perhaps even to zero. On the downside, Cherise would likely hear about it too. Sara hated the idea of Cherise getting the wrong idea about her, but she realized that, as the summer went on and Sara failed to pair off with anyone, Cherise along with the others would inevitably have reached that mistaken conclusion anyway. It doesn't really matter, Sara told herself. As soon as I can talk to Cherise, I can straighten all this out. Sara wondered, for the thousandth time, when that would be. Probably, she decided, when I get close enough to the day of my roasting, and I get more excited, that will conquer whatever this thing is that happens to me with Cherise.

Thinking of her roast reminded her. She dropped her book off by her bed in the storeroom, and went forward to the now-empty dining room, to the cooking bay extending out from the front wall of it, where Mindy and Cindy were attending to the roasting of tonight's main course.

Sara hadn't seen the enclosure, at the edge of town, where the slavegirls destined to be roasted for the restaurant were kept. Rather than keep them in a room inside the building -- none of them had ever lived in such a tiny, enclosed place, and it would have frightened them very much -- the live slavegirls were quartered until their cooking day, usually six or seven of them together at any one time, inside a much larger area, with trees and even a small brook flowing through, designed to resemble the enclosures where they had spent their childhoods. Sara understood that the Foundation, somehow, had received some expert advice on its design from a woman who had actually grown up in one. She wasn't clear on how they had managed that. She did know, from Derek, that giggles and sounds of sexual play could often be heard from within. Each morning, one or if necessary two of the girls were walked, in chains, from the enclosure, before a small crowd of onlookers, to the restaurant. The men were eager for a look at what they would be eating tonight; the girls were always excited to know that they were about achieve what even they knew was the culmination of any woman's life.

Tonight's meat had had a very nice body. Of course, Sara had no way to tell what kind of face had gone with it, with the head missing. That body was now stretched out horizontally, with a spit running through it from vagina to neck, with its wrists tied to its upper thighs with string, and ankles tied to the spit with the same type of string. A low but steady fire was burning in the pit underneath. The girl's skin was lightly browned, beyond the usual tanned skin tone island girls always had. Sara supposed she was about halfway cooked. She smelled wonderful.

Mindy -- Sara could tell which twin she was because she had a small medallion with the letter M attached to the front of her slave collar -- was just now giving the spit crank a quarter turn, putting the body in a buttocks-down position, while Cindy -- medallion with a C on it -- was brushing cooking sauce on the meat's stomach. Mindy looked up and smiled at Sara. "Hi." Cindy turned and offered an identical smile and greeting. It really was disconcerting how much alike they were.

It was, of course, still hotter in the cooking bay than in the rest of the restaurant, though not as bad as it could have been. The bay was a rectangular area projecting beyond the restaurant's front wall, with a big window at the front, and also windows on either side providing cross ventilation. Like all windows in the restaurant, these sported the louvered openings, which at present were cranked fully open.

Sara spoke to Mindy, only because the girl had been the first of the two to greet Sara. "You n... n... know who I am, right?"

Mindy locked the crank in place, and said, "If you mean do I know you're the girl we're going to barbecue at the end, yeah."

Sara snorted at the characterization, because it went to the heart of why she'd come to see the twins. She held out her hand. "Sara."

Mindy quickly wiped sauce off her hand and shook hands with her. "Mindy." Cindy wiped as well, and introduced herself.

Sara went on, "I j... j... just wanted to watch what you're d... d... d... doing here..." She gestured to indicate the roasting girl, the spit, the fire, "Is that the s... s... same thing you'll do to me?"

Mindy nodded. "As far as I know."

Cindy offered, "I think it won't be right here, though. They said something about building a barbecue pit outside."

Sara nodded. "Yeah, that's the way B... B... Bart told it." She pointed at the bowl Cindy was holding. "Can I t... t... taste it?" She wanted to get some idea what her own meat might taste like.

"Sure. You know, it's not quite the same as what it would be like after it's been cooked on the meat, but... anyway..." She dipped a finger in the sauce and held in front of Sara's mouth.

Sara, not expecting to be offered it in quite that manner, opened her mouth and sucked the sauce off Cindy's finger. She smiled. "Hey, that's really g... g... good!"

Cindy grinned. "Jeffrey's a wizard with this stuff."

Sara smiled. "Thanks. I just wanted... you know, s... s... some idea."

Another smile. "Sure."

Mindy suddenly brightened. "Say, would you be willing to give us a little help?"

Sara was taken aback. "Well, I d... d... don't know anything about k... k... cooking."

Mindy shook her head. "I just need a couple of strong arms." She looked to take in Sara's muscles more completely, and seemed to think her wish had definitely been granted. "Cin and me could both leave the meat alone for a few minutes, but we don't really like to do that. If you can help me move a popsicle into the kitchen, then Cin can stay here."

Sara was sure she must look lost. It took two girls to move a popsicle? "Uhhh, sure."

Mindy wiped her hands more thoroughly, put the cloth down, and, to Sara's surprise, leaned into Cindy and gave her a kiss on the lips. Cindy smiled and said, "See you in a few minutes."

Mindy turned back to Sara and said, "Okay, this way." She led Sara out through the dining room, to the other side where a door opened into the kitchen.

Along the way, to satisfy her curiosity, Sara asked, "What do you do the r... r... rest of the year?"

Mindy responded, "Whatever temp work comes up."

"T... T...Temp?"

Mindy looked at her, realizing the misunderstanding. "Oh, the Foundation doesn't own us. We're from a slave-temp agency, specializing in food preparation. The Foundation rented us for the summer last year, and again this year. I think they've got reservations for us for the next five summers, which is as far ahead as they can go." She smiled. "I guess they thought we did good work last year." She opened the kitchen door. "In between, we do whatever job come up -- you know, big company banquets, private parties, wherever they need to bring in somebody who can cook girlmeat." She looked back in the direction of her sister. "The agency has been really nice about renting us out together. Well, of course, there's not many clients who just want one cook, so it's no trouble. The agency just includes us as two out of however many. It's really fun work, and there's always good food to eat." She grinned.

Entering the kitchen, Sara could see Jeffrey chopping onions next to a big pot suspended over a hearth, which she strongly suspected would be hold tonight's stew. Joe was dicing potatoes. They both looked up briefly, nodded at Sara, and continued working.

Mindy went on explaining, "We always wanted to be slaves, because everything is taken care of for you, but we were just worried about, you know, who knows what an owner might do later, like sell the two of us to different places. But we figured out that if we submitted to the agency, we'd be safe, because slave-temp agencies hardly ever sell their slaves. You know, it's worth a lot more to them to keep renting us out. So it's worked out really well."

Mindy stopped in front of a large metal door, pulled on the handle and grunted with the effort of pulling the door open.

A cloud of condensation billowed into the room, along with a blast of frigid air that made Sara immediately shiver.

Beyond the door, the first thing Sara saw was three headless female bodies, hanging by their tied ankles from hooks at the end of chains, their arms hanging down.

Sara suddenly got it. These were the popsicles.

The main courses for any night at the restaurant were always fresh meat, snuffed and cooked that same day, but for incidentals, such as appetizers and the stew, they used frozen meat.

Mindy walked over to a hand crank on the wall, and started turning it. The body nearest Sara began descending slowly. She said to Sara, "Just kind of catch her as she falls so her arms don't break off. That gets little shards of bone in the meat."

Sara heard her, but had to force herself to move. When she'd agreed to help Mindy, she hadn't realized it would entail standing naked in a sub-freezing icebox. She had hunched her shoulders and hugged her arms against her chest the second she'd entered, and didn't see how she could do anything but stand there, crouched and shivering.

She was astonished that it didn't seem to be bothering Mindy, who was no less naked than Sara. "Aren't you k... k... cold?" She stammered for a different reason from usual.

"Oh! Sorry. I've spent the whole morning next to the fire, so this feels really nice right now. We'll be out in a couple of minutes, I promise."

I told her I'd help, Sara reminded herself, so I need to just grit my teeth and do it. She gripped the frozen woman's far shoulder and began pulling her to the left as she came down, anchored her left arm under the woman's shoulderblades, and reached over to put her other hand on the woman's buttocks. All of the woman's body parts, Sara decided she shouldn't have been surprised to find, were ice-cold and hard as rocks. Eventually Sara was holding the woman horizontally.

Mindy came over and looked at Sara wide-eyed. "Uhhh, we usually just try to keep the weight off her hands as she comes down and get her laid out on the floor, then both of us pick her up. Do you... want any help?"

Sara shook her head. She was fine holding up the woman by herself, and just wanted out of that damned freezer as soon as possible. "This all you n... n... need?" It was all she could do to keep her teeth from chattering.

Mindy choked back a laugh. "What, do you want to hold two of them? Actually I think maybe you could manage that. But this is it, they just needed the one body out." Mindy backed out of the freezer, Sara following, turning the body sideways to get it out of the door. She followed Mindy, relieved beyond words to be back in the temperate comfort of the kitchen, and laid the woman on the slab Mindy indicated.

She followed Mindy back out into the dining room, where Mindy said, "Thank you so much." She laughed. "You'd better avoid us the rest of the time here, because I can think of a lot of heavy lifting for you to do if I can grab you. Anyway, thanks again." To her surprise, Mindy gave her a warm hug, then ran across the dining room to the cooking bay. Sara blinked again when Mindy stopped in front of Cindy, put her hand on Cindy's waist and they shared an even warmer kiss than before, lasting several seconds. When Sara heard Cindy murmur something like "Missed you," she began to feel so much like a voyeur that she decided it was time to get to her reading and give the twins some space.

TWO WEEKS LATER

Sara opened up the library closet, replaced the book she'd finished reading and picked out another. She did enjoy reading, but that wasn't the only reason she stopped by the library so often.

The library was in the same hallway as the girls' rooms -- those of the interns and also the slaves. All of the girls, that is, other than Sara herself, lived here. Cherise's room was two doors down from where Sara was standing, on her right. Classes were over for the afternoon, and the dinner crowd would start coming in about two hours.

Sara contrived to be near Cherise's room as often as she could manage it, usually unobserved. She didn't stop and listen at the door, but she listened carefully for any sounds from inside as she passed by. Right now Cherise and Ashley, with whom she shared her room, were both inside, most likely studying, but Sara was always in fear, when she passed by, that she would hear them doing something else. She didn't know what she would do if she heard sounds of sex in progress, which she did occasionally hear from the other rooms. Die on the spot, possibly. To her relief, there was only silence.

No, wait. There was...

Sara's stomach spasmed in agony, as she thought, this is it! But she realized the noises were from farther down the hall. As she walked in that direction, she realized they were from Mindy and Cindy's room: Heavy breathing with sighs, a voice, recognizably that of one of the twins but there was no way to know which, softly but urgently saying "Lick there, right there, yeah!", followed by a sharp gasp and another sigh, and liquid sounds of kisses.

Sara smiled and shook her head. She had a sister of her own, but a five-year age difference made it a way different situation. She wondered what it would be like to share her entire life with a sister who looked and thought exactly like her. She understood that siblings like that could sometimes be very close.

She guessed they must have finished cooking tonight's woman and been given a little time off before the demands of dinnertime began. They probably made the most of whatever time they could spend alone together.

Sara took her book into the dining room, now empty, and took a seat near one of the lanterns. The dining room was brighter than the storage room, one of several reasons she preferred reading there. She put her feet up on another chair and opened the book.

She could hear the rain coming down outside. It had been coming down fairly steadily for two days. Sara was glad, as always, that she never needed to be out in the local weather.

Above the sound of the rain, Sara heard another noise, looked up and saw Jill come into the room. Jill saw she'd been noticed, smiled, and continued heading in Sara's direction. "Is it okay if I sit a minute? I wanted to ask you something."

I hope she's not looking for a hookup, Sara thought. Sara hadn't run into that problem since Trish, a couple of weeks ago, so she imagined Trish had been talking -- especially to Jill, her own roommate. Sara smiled tentatively and gestured to the remaining empty seat at the table.

Jill sat, folded her hands on the table, and seemed to be looking for a way to start. Finally she said, "Is it true, what I heard? When they roast you it'll be a huge party, out in front? They're going to snuff you and barbecue you in front of everybody, before they all eat you later?" Jill's eyes were bright, almost unnaturally so, and she seemed to be having a hard time breathing.

Sara remembered how excited Jill had been when she'd heard the first version of the plan, before it got bigger. She'd already said she wanted to be the one in Sara's place next year. It looked to Sara as though the new, more elaborate program took Jill to a whole new level of arousal.

Sara nodded and said, "That's what they t... t... tell me."

Jill's mouth opened, and she breathed still more unevenly through it. She withdrew her right hand from the table and dropped it into her lap. It was hard for Sara to tell, with the table hiding the view, but it looked as though Jill's hips twitched, once, twice.

Jill suddenly leapt to her feet, and panted vaguely, "I'll... I've gotta go!" and ran out of the room.

Sara stared after her in wonderment, then grinned. Jill almost had an orgasm just sitting here, she told herself. Now she's finishing up in a little more privacy. She really wants to be next year's party girl now. It was funny: the whole idea of the party was essentially the same as what most women had as a normal sendoff back home. But for Jill, the thought of doing it here, doing it in front of men from an alien culture, somehow added just that extra something she couldn't get anywhere else. At least it seemed to Sara that that must be what the deal was. Sara herself found it very exciting as well, but obviously not to the degree Jill did.

Sara leaned across the table, looked down where Jill had been sitting, and almost laughed. I'd better wipe that up, she told herself. That's my job.

She went to get a towel.

Paula entered the dining room, said "Hey" to Sara with a grin, and walked over to the front window. She shook her head. "Doesn't stop very often, does it?"

The question seemed to Sara purely rhetorical, and Sara answered it with a shrug.

Paula continued scanning the vista available from the window, and suddenly froze, with a sharp gasp. "What are they doing to her?"

Sara, curious to see what seemed to have shocked Paula, came up behind her and looked in the direction Paula was facing. She frowned and said, "Shit!"

Across the square from the restaurant, a young slavegirl was standing on a platform that Sara had seen, empty, during the walk to the restaurant. The girl was standing there because she had no choice. Her arms were stretched up overhead, spread apart in a V, held up by chains attached to the cuffs on her wrists that ran up to an overhead beam -- chains sufficiently taut that the girl could just manage to stand on her toes. Sara could just hear her moaning in misery, the rain obviously adding to her suffering.

As Sara and Paula looked on helplessly, a trader with two slaves who were pushing a small wagon -- obviously a small-time trader, as a more successful one might have had a half-dozen slaves and a larger wagon -- passed by. On seeing the girl, he spoke to his slavegirls. Sara could see one of the girls bite her lip as she flashed a scared look at her owner. Apparently on his orders, both girls went up the wooden steps leading up onto the platform and stopped standing near the suffering girl, waiting there for further instructions.

Sara now saw a man, who'd been sitting sheltered under an overhang across from the platform, walk across the square to the platform, holding, it appeared to Sara, a whip. Sara moaned in the back of her throat. It seemed clear what was about to happen, though the "why" of it was mysterious.

Behind her, Sara heard someone enter the dining room. She looked back and saw it was Derek. She waved him forward frantically.

As Derek joined Sara and Paula at the window, the man with the whip mounted the platform, and spoke to the trader's slavegirls. Sara could see the look of fear on both faces increase. One of them, at the man's direction, stepped forward, to within just a few feet of the chained girl.

The man swung the whip at the chained girl now. The slapping sound against her skin, and her scream, were nearly simultaneous. He motioned the nearby slavegirl back, and had the other step forward. Another slap and scream.

Tears running down her cheeks, Paula said, "Derek, what's going on? Why are they doing that to her?"

Derek sighed. "No telling exactly what she did, but they're punishing her for it. Most likely refusing to follow an order, or some other sort of defiance. When they punish a slave here, at least in town -- they might do it different ways in different parts of the island -- they're using it as a teaching tool at the same time. Any slavegirl that passes by is made by her master to watch, up close, one stroke of the whip, so she gets a very clear idea what happens to recalcitrant slaves. She might be made to learn that same lesson over and over during her life, to keep it fresh. How many strokes the punished girl gets altogether depends on how many slavegirls happen by."

Paula was shaking her head, for the moment unable to speak, so it was left to Sara, ironically the only one of the pair of girls still able to get a word out, to ask the next obvious question: "H... H... How long will she b... b... be there?"

In a low voice, obviously one wishing it didn't have to impart the information, said, "Usually it's twenty-four hours. For something really bad it could be forty-eight."

Paula whirled and stared at Derek. "She'll be there overnight??"

Derek nodded unhappily.

Paula said fiercely, "Derek, we're right here -- you're right here, you and a bunch of other strong men in here. We have to do something!"

Derek shook his head and said, "Paula, listen to me. It's important that you understand this. We can't interfere. The authorities here would be so angry at us that they'd make us leave, and the whole program would be ruined." He looked directly at her, but made sure Sara was listening as well. "We have a choice between helping that one single slavegirl now, or else helping all of the slaves on this island, starting maybe a generation from now, maybe two, and forever after that. We can't do both."

Paula stared at him silently for several seconds, and then dropped her eyes. "Okay." She looked back out the window. "I've never been as glad as I am right now that we're here doing this. I know we are doing something, and someday something like that..." she nodded towards the suffering girl, "...will never happen again. I'll always remember I was part of this."

Derek patted her shoulder silently, turned and left the room. Not before Sara, to her surprise, saw a tear running from his eye.

Sara decided that for the present, the storeroom was a better place for reading after all.