Inheritrix

Chapter 5

Learning the Ropes

'This is the problem with you free-range moids. Organic imperatives don't work without proper conditioning. The purpose of blood courtesy is to keep you obedient, not stun you every time you come within ten klicks of a woman. Men are little enough use as it is. If you're just going to lie around while we do everything for you, then what was the point of the Corrections?'

The anger and frustration had bled from her voice. The Vixen explained his sins with a calm grace. She practically cradled him as she carried him back up the stairs. His mistress suspended him with two hands instead of one, showing a leniency Bren knew he could never deserve. Her fingers knotted through his wet hair while her other hand gripped his cock and balls by the stalk. Bren's arms and legs hung down, kissed by the rasp of her stockings as she climbed the stairs. It was the most erotic sensation Bren had ever experienced, and it came now, when no man had ever been less worthy of a woman's touch.

'What this world needs is a thorough weeding. Every living moid needs to be rounded up and either given purpose or exterminated. You're a danger to the environment running wild out there. You're vermin. That's why we corrected you in the first place. You almost destroyed this planet before we put you in your place. Now we're back where we started. You've forgotten your place and even we've forgotten your place. Not that anyone listens to me, of course. Not even you. I must be the only woman alive capable of learning from history. It must be an aberration in my template.'

She would dispose of him, of course. Abandon him on her doorstep for the composters to collect. At least then he could find a function. His corpse would feed something useful.

'Well, just because everyone else gave up, doesn't mean I will. I'm going to salvage you. I'm going to correct you. I'm going to prove that even a rusty little scrote like you can be made useful.'

She set him down on a workbench. Bren felt the fibre of natural wood beneath him. Still tender from the ice shower, he sensed every splinter. The bare timber drank the cool moisture from his skin.

The Vixen turned his head so that his eyes locked to hers. Bren felt the scramble in his blood from another dose of courtesy.

'You need to be bound. I'm going to teach your body that I control it, not you. These dreary little fits of yours are an insult. If you're going to be helpless, it'll be by my command.'

The Vixen flipped him onto his stomach. Bren felt metal close round his wrists with a pinch and a click. His hands locked together behind his back.

'You've been bred to respond to control. But because nobody ever wanted you before I took pity on you, your brain tried to compensate. It's punishing you in place of a mistress. And because it's a male brain, it did a terrible job.'

She sealed another set of cuffs around him. Above the elbows. The paired binds drew his arms back. Bren struggled against the pain. Just a shudder. A small, startled reaction to the cramp as his shoulder blades folded together. But it was movement. Bren had moved.

'See? You're learning already.' As she spoke, the Vixen moved to the side of the bench. She grabbed his hair and then pulled his head up. Bren lay on his front, writhing against the doubled cuffs. He could not see her face from that position. Her synthskin skirt filled his vision, the tight fabric swollen round her pubic mound and taut between her upper thighs.

'All you needed was a firm hand. And don't worry,' she said, pausing to slap him across the face. 'I have a very firm hand.'

The slap woke him. Bren felt like he had risen from a nightmare. The same blend of shock and relief. Life suddenly felt simple. Bren's complex, jarring anxieties aligned to the magnetic pull of his mistress. The superimposed control apparatus in his brain corrected itself. The detuned threat response nuclei, the distended trauma stores and the high-traffic punishment pathways all recombined in their intended format as they yielded to the Vixen, like a cancer responding to medicinal poison.

The Vixen stroked his cheek where she had slapped him moments before. Her artful fingers melted the sting in his skin. His scalp writhed where she gripped his crown. The fine, invisible hairs on Bren's face bundled round the path of each finger like plants reaching for light. Still frozen from his shower, Bren felt the heat flow from her to him. Small warm aftershocks of unwinding tension appeared at unrelated points across his bound body. Bren convulsed in shock at the delicacy of her touch. When she slapped him again, his cry was a strummed chord with high notes of surprise, grunts against the pain and moans of frustration at the sudden end of her caress.

'Better?'

'Yes, mistress. Thank you, mistress.'

The sound of his own voice surprised him. Bren had not spoken since leaving the clan shelter. The blood in his mouth and the injury to his throat made his words low, slow, coarse and wet, like a trickle through gravel.

Another slap. Sharper and harder than before. A rebuke rather than a tease.

'Don't ever thank me again. Do you think your appreciation means anything to me? You show your gratitude by learning your lessons and following my instructions.'

Still holding his hair, she jerked him from the workbench. With his hands cuffed behind his back and his legs too weak to respond to the short fall, Bren landed on the corner of his hip.

'I gave you an order. I told you to get on your knees.'

A difficult manoeuvre with his head held firm and his arms bound tight. Bren's legs flailed beneath him as he struggled to fold himself into a kneel. The fresh, grating pain in his hip increased like a ratchet as he twisted and stumbled into the shape his mistress demanded.

A poor attempt at a kneel, he knew. His slim thighs lay crooked and his shins crossed beneath him. Bren tried to correct his posture, but the weight of his small body was too much for his weak legs. The Vixen held him so close that her lower half dominated his field of vision. As sinful as it was to compare himself to his owner, Bren could not help but note the difference between his limbs and hers. She stood perfectly straight. Her muscles held solid as she balanced on kiss-shaped red suede platform heels. Bren knelt so close that he could see the glow of flawless, healthy skin through the knit of the flayon stockings.

She must have registered the insult of his crippled bearing. Nothing escaped her superior regard. Especially not Bren's many failings. But she did not comment. Bren assumed she added it to the tally of his later punishments.

'Stay there. When I order you into a position, you hold it until I tell you otherwise.'

When she released her grip on his hair, Bren braced to support himself in the pose she had commanded. The Vixen moved beyond view.

He heard her comb through the debris that filled the room. Stacks thumped as they tumbled. Drawers slid open with a hiss and then slammed with a gulp. Steel chains rattled high like rain. Bren listened to the shifts of timber, rubber and groaning leather. Ancient, natural materials that sounded sturdy even in death. The idea frightened him. There were like ghosts. Bren lived in a world where everything from the buildings to his own body was grown, used and then pulped into fertiliser. The steel in the four rings that held his arms back had been dug from below ground, boiled supple and then beaten into shape. Just like him. When his mistress returned with a real leather collar, Bren gasped at the honour.

The restraint was primeval. Tawny patches showed in the cracks and mottles of the brown leather. Rust furred the rivets, rings and buckle. The inner padding had rotted away and so raw prickly suede closed round Bren's throat as the Vixen fixed the collar. Bren choked as the bind shut firm.

'Too tight? I don't think so. I think it looks just right. If you start to turn blue, I might show mercy and slip it open a notch.'

She sealed the buckle with a fossilised padlock that had corroded to the colour of a peach stone. The grinding snap of the old mechanism trembled through the collar.

'Not as secure as a genelock, I know. But I'm going for a classic look, which is why I chose a relic like you in the first place. We'll need to keep this key safe in case we need to loosen your collar, won't we?'

As she said this, the Vixen crushed the small rusty key into paprika.

'Oh dear,' she said with a smile. 'Looks like you're not the only antique around here that breaks easily.'

She slapped him again to underline her point. Examining her fingers, she saw the red residue from the shattered key that she then wiped onto Bren's face.

'Might spoil the tone, but I'd better dress you the modern way. If another lock broke, I'd never see that delicate little body of yours again.'

The Vixen tore a synthskin grub from a blister pack and then spat on it to genelock the garment to her control. The bud resembled a leech in shape, colour and polish. She showed Bren the rows of teeth that spiralled like aloe spines.

'Now, were shall I plant this? What part of you do I want covered first? Ah, of course.'

The grub bit the head of Bren's penis. His long, high screams were a whistle as the organism burrowed into him. It devoured Bren's biomatter to grow its plastic flesh across the surface of his body.

The Vixen pressed a palm against his open mouth. Bren continued to wail as the burning synthskin crept along his cock.

'I do love to hear a scrote scream. But it's like sugar. Sickly in large doses. And you'll be moaning for a while yet. You need a gag.'

She rose again to rummage through the junk piles. Bren looked down at the sleeve of black wax that now covered half his penis. He tried not to cry. His mistress had made it clear that the sound annoyed her. But the fire of the swelling synthskin combined with the strain as it drank his blood made Bren feel as though he turned inside out. He managed to contain himself to low, muffled sobs.

'Ah, perfect,' said the Vixen, shouting from an unseen corner of the room. Bren heard her voice grow louder as she moved back toward him. The clicks of her heels sounded out a jog that matched the sunny animation in her voice. Somehow, her levity was more terrifying than her earlier temper.

'Knew I'd seen this around here somewhere. This should shut you up as well as give you something useful to do. Such an elegant solution. That's what the world's lost, you know. Elegance. That sense of graceful simplicity. We'll show them, won't we? My natural grace and your simple little body. Don't you worry, bitch,' said the Vixen as she leaned in to apply his gag, 'you're going to suffer in style.'

She moved behind him to tighten the strap of the gag. Bren turned cross eyed as he tried to make sense of his newest restraint. Sprouting from the ball between his teeth was the ostrich plume of a feather duster.