The third woman went to close the door Tain had left open before coming back to the small crowd, Risdin pretty much leading the way toward the right side of the warehouse. There were a few doors in that direction which suggested the presence of rooms rather than an open floor, and when they reached one of the doors and Risdin opened it Tain found that her guess was right. Behind the door was a fairly large room that looked cleaner and sturdier than the rest of the warehouse but just as empty.
“If you get sloppy and leave signs that you’re around, you end up being retaken,” Risdin said as she gestured to the floor. “If you two will sit down and make yourselves comfortable, we’ll have a meal put together for you in just a couple of minutes. Areen, will you close this door too, please?”
The third woman, Areen, turned and closed the door the way she had the outer one. She’d been staring at Ennie while Tain urged the girl to sit down on the floor, a heavy sadness in her brown eyes. Tain had the feeling that Areen might have been as bad off as Ennie at one time, and now felt a kinship with the girl. That Areen had pulled out of the depression said something about the woman’s strength, a strength that her slender body and short brown hair didn’t show signs of.
Risdin and Celene were busy moving aside one section of one of the room’s walls, behind which there seemed to be quite a number of things. One of those things was a cast-iron griller, and after Risdin had dragged the thing out Celene filled it with charcoal. Getting a fire going didn’t take long, and once the fire was burning well Risdin put a coffee pot on one side of the griller. Areen used the other side for a frying pan filled with eggs and potatoes, and in no time Tain’s mouth began to water.
The food was ready before the coffee, but Areen didn’t wait and neither did Tain. She accepted the metal plate handed to her and immediately began to stuff down the food, stopping only when she saw that Ennie was ignoring a similar plate.
“Ennie, you have to get your strength back,” Tain said to the girl, speaking softly. “I’d really like you to eat as much of that food as you can hold, otherwise you’ll be putting us and our new friends in danger. If we have to make a run for it at any point and you pass out, I can’t see the rest of us just leaving you behind. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Tain was hoping hard that the girl wouldn’t choose to ignore her, and for once her hopes came true. Ennie’s head came up just a tad while she considered what Tain had said, and then she picked up the plate and began to eat. A glance at the three women showed Risdin smiling, Celene frowning, and Areen disturbed, but none of the three said anything. Relief at the silence let Tain go back to her own food, since she was fairly certain that she’d lied to Ennie. The three women most probably would not have risked stopping for Ennie if she fainted, but they’d realized that the truth was sometimes something that shouldn’t be mentioned.
The coffee was ready by the time Tain had finished eating, and when Ennie refused a cup Risdin asked if Ennie would like to rest instead. The girl agreed that she would like to rest, so Areen got out a pallet that was downright fat with stuffing, put it against the far wall of the room, then arranged a blanket on it. Ennie seemed a bit steadier when she got up to go to the pallet, and once she’d lain down Areen came to join her two companions where they sat near Tain with coffee of their own.
“We can get you out of town tonight, once it gets dark,” Risdin said to Tain in a low voice after tasting the coffee. Tain had already given her name and Ennie’s, which had apparently made all the women feel better. “Our group has a few hiding places, but we know only one of them so that’s the one we’ll take you to.”
“That makes sense,” Tain said after tasting her own coffee. The liquid was strong and unsweetened, but it added strength to what she’d gotten from the food. “If you happen to get captured, you won’t be able to betray more than the one hiding place. But it’s possible you won’t betray anyone anyway unless you’re tortured. Since you’re still really under the influence of the drug, being given the drug a second time might not negate that order to ignore orders.”
“You know, that never occurred to us,” Risdin said after exchanging startled glances with the other two women. “We’ve never met anyone who was given the drug twice, so we don’t know for certain what would happen. Do you know for certain?”
“No,” Tain had to admit, but she’d also been trying to make up her mind about something. “Tell me, approximately how many women are in your group, and just how far are you prepared to go to be really free?”
“Why do you want to know how many of us there are?” Celene asked at once, suspicion flaring in her eyes again. “And what do you mean by really free? We’re free right now and we mean to stay that way.”
“You’re not free of the drug and you’re not free to walk the streets any time you please,” Tain countered just as quickly, doing nothing to avoid that hard blue gaze. “I don’t need to know exactly how many of you there are, but even if there are no more than fifty or so that’s still too many to spend the rest of their lives in hiding. The rest of your lives. If there was a way to get rid of slavery for good, would you be willing to take a few chances?”
“What way, and what kind of chances?” Risdin asked as Celene just stared at Tain. “And why do I have the feeling that you’re not like the rest of us? You should be both terrified and delighted at having been offered our help, but you don’t seem to be either. What makes you so different?”
“I’m different because I’m not a native of this world,” Tain said, having consciously overridden the need to keep her true origins secret.
“I’m part of a group that’s trying to end slavery on this world, and it was just bad luck that my partner and I ended up as slaves ourselves. I meant to take my partner back to where our people can help her, but there’s really something else I ought to do first. If I can count on you ladies getting Ennie out of here in case something happens to me, I can do that something else with a clear head.”
“Why would people from another world care about what happens to us?” Areen asked, a question Tain had expected from Celene rather than from her. “Slavery has been going on for years and years, but now, suddenly, you’re in the mood to stop it?”
“Our people have been trying for years, but the sad fact is that they expected to get somewhere with diplomacy,” Tain explained, grimacing to show her opinion of the mindless waste of time. “Diplomacy may work when you’re dealing with people exactly like yourself, but when there’s a big enough difference in cultures diplomacy doesn’t stand much of a chance. That’s why we were sent, to see if we could find a different way to settle the problem, but we’re not alone. One of the two men you saw taken prisoner is one of mine.”
The various revelations had the three women looking at each other, but for a long moment no one said anything. It was definitely disturbance that filled the three, but when Risdin looked directly at Tain again Tain saw something that might have been hope.
“That must be why the men were captured instead of killed,” Risdin said, and Tain had the impression that she spoke more for the benefit of the other two women than for Tain’s. “They have a plan, and someone wants to know what that plan is so they can stop it. Do you really think that whatever their plan is it will work?”
“Truthfully, I don’t know,” Tain admitted, refusing to let herself sigh.
“Ennie and I were originally on our own, but when the accident happened our people sent the two men to buy us out of slavery. I do know that they had some kind of meeting to attend that kept us from leaving this town, but they were taken before they could get to the meeting. What I want to do is free them from where they’re being held.”