Fiction: Exit Jupiter

If the end came tomorrow, what would be on his wrist? That man, her master, who so deeply loved haute horology.

High above the Jovian clouds, she fidgeted with the clasp of her ring. It was a slaving device that contracted tighter around her finger the more it was tampered with. In a barbaric way, it showed how much she still loved him.

But she thought she knew the way to its combination.

Asleep across her body, she had arranged his watches in a row. She knew because he had told her which were his favorites. His favorites held the code to her freedom. And she knew the beats of their mechanical hearts held the key to the ring.

Watching her master run his fingers over the chunks of polished steel, which he would pick up, and his eyes as he wrapped the exotic leather bands around his wrist, holding up the watch to the windows filled with the glowing red light of the gas giant.

If she knew wrong her finger would be crushed, its blood supply constricted. He would stand over her as she grimaced in frustration and shame, and demand to know why.

That evening, in a gown of glittering silver, she danced with him cheek to cheek. After dinner she had prepared, of space crabs and spiced weed from the ice oceans of the moon Europa.

Kneeling on a stool, she poured him a vintage. She raised her goblet and he smiled at her beauty. As they drank, she walked over to him and sat in his lap.

This is yours, she said, dropping the slave ring into his wine. Through the pale green-yellow liquid he could see her bare finger. How could it be?

By law, the collector of fine watches had to let her go. It was his promise. He stared in his drink, at the dismantled arcs of silver and gold as she walked out of the penthouse. But in reality they were but a clever fake she had been machining, and on the goblet, a strip of discreet magicians tape that obstructed her still slaved finger.

In the corridor of the habitation sphere, she counted to 100 for him to decouple the ring. It was a risk she had to take, then she pushed for an elevator to the shuttle deck. The doors slid close, about her finger, over the slaving ring, crushing both flesh and metal. She cried out, then turned her finger and let the flattened ring be crushed again just so. And the gnarled device came loose.

The shuttle bay was chilly and wind swept. She rubbed her finger, swollen and bruised. But the watch on her wrist had told the time wrong. The bay was empty. It was an interplanetary timer set to the Venusian meridian. She hugged herself, shivering. He would see the scars.