Loving Them

by Rebecca Royce

  I had work to do on Paloma. Clay had tried to point it out. Forgiveness was a problem for me.

  Tommy started to snore gently across the room. I knew the way they each breathed now to the point that I could identify who was in the room with me based on that alone. I loved small things like that. Every day we were more and more invested in each other. Well, maybe that wasn’t fair. They were brothers. Birth had invested them in each other.

  But every day, working out this shared relationship became easier.

  Quinn crawled in next to me, pushing me closer against Clay. The bed wasn’t made for three, but I’d rather be squished than not have them with me. Clay scooted a bit, which put him against the wall. He rolled over until his back was to it and his front toward me. He kissed my temple and closed his eyes. “Sleep, Paloma. Today was too much.”

  Quinn snuggled against me. “He’s right. Way too much today. All this time, she’s been sick. We could have helped.”

  I kissed his nose. “You could have died. She did this to save you. That’s how she could love you best.”

  I wasn’t sure I one-hundred-percent agreed with that. But since it wasn’t going to do anyone any good at this point to start stirring up questions with no answers, I wanted to calm their hearts. They had too much pain for one lifetime.

  He kissed me gently. “I don’t know what we’d do if we didn’t have you. We were at the end. We didn’t know it. But we were. I was done. I might have gone and turned myself into my father just to put an end to the whole mess. Then you were there.”

  “Well,” I whispered. “You guys technically found me.”

  “That was me.” Clay kissed my cheek. “Go to sleep. Both of you.”

  I closed my eyes. “You literally saved me. All of you.”

  The feel of the train floating through the air and sending us wherever Clay had told it to, soothed me into a rhythm where I could finally rest.

  I dreamed, but what was funny was that I knew I was asleep, aware I was within a cognizant dream.

  Still, I walked through the experience, knowing it wouldn’t be pleasant the second it started. I sat in a room, in a chair with my wrists bound. Across the desk was Clay. He had a week’s worth of beard on his face.

  “We finally caught you. Did you think you could run forever?”

  I leaned back. Screw him if he thought he could intimidate me. “I did, actually. I thought by now you’d quit looking for me.”

  “After you got Tommy killed? Did you think we’d ever forgive you? You have to be held accountable for what happened.”

  I wanted to slug him. “I thought you’d know better by now. It was not my fault. We can’t be held responsible for the things our families do.”

  “We can, Paloma. This is the world we live in.”

  I sat up with a jolt. Quinn moaned and rolled over, but Clay’s eyes flew open. “You okay?”

  I wrapped my arms around him. “Nightmare. Not sure what it was all about, but you were interrogating me. Said I got Tommy killed. Blamed me for my family.”

  He kissed my forehead. “I’d slit my own throat first.”

  I hated that imagery as much as I did the dream. “I think it was you because you would be the one who would never let go of anyone hurting us. That’s not the problem.” I had to still my racing heart. “I think my family is going to try to hurt us.”

  He smoothed my hair out of my face. “Not your in-laws. Those guys wanted out of Oceania as fast as they could go.”

  I agreed with his reading. Maybe my sister was happy when she was home. I had to hope that was the case. “But my father…”

  He pressed our heads together, and I could feel him breathe against me. There was something so comforting about the closeness, like his heartbeat near my own could drive away the dream even further. “He’s a risk. But he isn’t the only one with friends.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Clay was quiet for a moment. “Don’t bite my head off.”

  That was a strange response. “Okay.”

  “She’s very sorry, Paloma. Maybe it’s time to use that. I don’t mean to sound mercenary, but it’s our family against the world. I trust your instincts. If you think Tommy’s at risk, then we start from there.”

  I loved Clay, and I loved that he listened. Even if it was just about a dream. I snuggled against him. Could I use my mother to get to my father? Would I? For these four, I would beg, borrow, kill, maim, and use whomever I had to. They were my family, my whole universe.

  There was no step too far to keep them safe from a world that had wanted them dead—since they were babies.

  I still had no idea where we were. We’d gotten off the air-train in the dark along with a crowd of people who had disappeared. I held Keith’s hand in my own. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Nope. Totally bizarre.”

  There were lighted paths, and we followed Clay down one until it stopped. He sat down on the ground, and so the rest of us did, too. What were we waiting for?

  “Two minutes until sunrise. Perfect.”

  All right, so whatever we were about to do involved the sun? I felt a cool breeze, and the radiation counter moved from green to blue. I looked down. They wanted me to run for help if it hit orange. Blue was four steps away, but I’d preferred green.

  Keith rubbed my arm. “The city of RNY is perpetually at blue. I lived there, and I’m fine. Blue comes and goes. It’s okay. No worse than the air pollution on Sandler One. Or what you regularly got despite the precautions on Mars Station. There’s always a little radiation.”

  There was radiation on Mars Station? Why hadn’t anyone told me? I asked this, and Keith shook his head. “Maybe they thought you knew.”

  The sun started to rise over the horizon. At first it was just a touch of gold. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Then colors exploded around me. Or at least they seemed to. Purple. Orange. Pink. Grey. Brown. The influx of life from what had been darkness showed me where Clay had brought us.

  I’d heard about this place. Everyone had. It was a large, cavernous hole in the ground. A canyon of sorts, so big, so broad that I couldn’t see one side standing on the ledge of the other. I stared down, and the bottom eluded me. Quinn came to my side and stared down with me.

  “This was a good call, Clay,” Quinn called over his shoulder.

  Clay joined us, grinning while he looked down, too. “I used to come here sometimes when I needed a day away from work. Maybe even then I understood I was on the wrong side of history. Anyway, I would contemplate the vastness of life. Sometimes I would see… ah, yeah, there they are. They always come at sunrise and sunset.”

  Very little had survived unscathed the nuclear wars of so many thousands of years ago. The human race had started to decline before that when people stopped having female babies. It was a very, very bad time. Nearly the end. Very little had survived unchanged, so much so that we almost didn’t know what people had done with their day-to-day lives before the bombs.

  This canyon—the famous place—hadn’t changed. Crops grew here, water flowed, and despite the blue radiation line, people who stayed here remained healthy. No one knew if it was because of the elevation or something else. But a sisterhood had formed here, the original one that the dreaded Sisterhood I had been dropped off at had been based on.

  I saw the hooded women walking toward the cliffs. They got on their knees and saluted the sun. I wished I could see them as beautiful. The song was lovely. All I could wonder was if those women were happy. Were they there of their own choice?

  Tommy put his head on my shoulder. “They’re not forced. It’s not the same that way. They have to come, of their own volition, at twenty-one years old. I checked after we met. I read about all the various sisterhoods. This one is okay.”

  “How many are there?”

  He kissed my neck. “That I know of? Twenty.”

  I felt better knowing that. There were seven women, and they were all dressed in white. “I really can’t
believe we’re here. I never thought to see this place.”

  Keith stepped to Quinn’s left. “It’s not explainable what happened here or what didn’t happen. I don’t really understand it, and that says a lot.”

  There was no way to stand there on the foot of that majesty, on top of the canyon that had survived—and continued to thrive—when nothing else had, and not feel like a tiny little blip in the universe. We had huge issues to contend with, but then so had the millions and millions of people who had passed through here over the years. What had they needed? Why had they come? What had they taken away?

  I was standing on the edge of forever. That was the only way to feel. There were more colors than I’d known existed, and it all welcomed me into the vast existence that sometimes I forgot was around me.

  I had four husbands. They loved me. I was free to stand here and enjoy this moment, experience it, and I answered to no one. That wasn’t true for everyone else in the universe. It wasn’t just Sandler Space where there was a problem. Some of the Dark Planets had small despots ruling everything.

  None of it could be allowed to continue. Those people deserved their day in the sun. None of it would happen if good people didn’t say “No more” to the power struggles of the truly evil.

  “You look determined, P.” Quinn grinned at me. “I think we’ve energized her.”

  “Thank you for loving me.” I stared straight ahead, knowing all four of them could hear me. “I’ll never stop being grateful that you do.”

  Tommy squeezed me from behind. “Thank you for loving us, too.”

  A thought dawned on me. “Tommy are you holding me so I don’t get whisked away over the side of the canyon?”

  “Well… maybe that’s a secondary reason. I just like holding you.”

  I laughed because I had to, and I loved the way it made all of them grin. We were all together on the edge of the Earth, and for a few minutes there was nothing and no one but us. I breathed in the day.

  A day later, back in Oceania with all of its plots and schemes, I stared at my tablet. What I was about to do was hard. I’d never imagined a scenario like the one I was about to face. I squared my shoulders and contacted my mother. Her face appeared on my screen.

  “Paloma.” She smiled. “I never expected to hear from you.”

  “Yes, well, circumstances are strange. How are you Mom?”

  She patted her own cheek. “How am I? Well, I’m always well.”

  I could feel that my period was starting. It was a strange sensation, but my mood had gotten fouler as each day went on. Today would be the day, and it would be a rough one. I didn’t have time for games; let Tommy play them.

  “Mom, I know that Dad is plotting something against my husbands, and I am here to make you an offer.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “An offer?”

  “You can leave. You can go anywhere you like or to anyone you please. I will help you. I didn’t understand you when I was younger, and maybe I only partially do now. But I see sadness in your eyes, and I don’t believe it’s all directed at me. Isn’t there anything you’d like to do more than follow my scheming father around?”

  I half expected her to end our communication. Instead she sighed. “I have an elderly aunt. She’s on Venus Colony. I’d like to go live with her. She takes long walks and plays the violin. That’s where I’d like to be.”

  I leaned forward. “If you want to go to Venus Colony, consider it done.”

  “But your father—”

  I cut her off. “—will wish you well. I’ll guarantee it.”

  Maybe there was a way to make us all happy. A quid pro quo. My mother didn’t have to get the short end of the deal. And why had I never known that she had an elderly aunt? A million secrets in my family, and I’d barely scratched the surface.

  He didn’t know we were coming. At his desk making deals, that was how I always thought of my father, and nothing had changed. He’d married Amber off well. He had political clout. Why did he have to continue to ruin people’s lives? Was he bored? Was he just built that way?

  I liked to believe there would come a time when I would sit down with my four husbands and we wouldn’t bother anyone else. We could live, the five of us pursuing our dreams, as a family. My dad didn’t seem to be able to conduct himself that way.

  “Carson.” He jumped when Tommy called out his name. That was the problem. He was so completely out of it because he was secure in his belief of his own superiority, never a good way to be. “We’re here to talk terms.”

  My father jumped to his feet. “Who let you in here?”

  “No one.” Clay leaned against the wall. “We’re Sandlers, remember? We don’t ask permission to go where we want to go.”

  “This is outrageous. Paloma, how dare you. Your mother will hear of your behavior.”

  My mother had been gone the whole day. He hadn’t even noticed. Just another possession to get, use, and discard. There were so many ways he could break my heart if I let him. I never intended to let him again.

  “She’s gone, Dad. She’s not coming back. She gave us the key to let us in, so we didn’t even break in to get in here.”

  I said my part, and I withdrew. There were things on Keith’s tablet that I never wanted to see again. Once was enough. Dead bodies, screaming children, death, destruction, power. I’d known my father wasn’t the best person, but there was bad, and then there was so deplorable I couldn’t live with it. I understood my husbands even better. Living with the knowledge that the person who was half responsible for my being in the universe was a monster was a hard way to exist.

  I wandered out into the living room. My mother had hung pictures on the walls. Most of them were of Amber and her husbands. I examined the ones from the wedding. My sister had worn her light blue dress like she’d been born to do so. She smiled, and it looked real. Amber was relaxed, and her husbands grinned from ear to ear. What had happened since then?

  “How could you do this?” My father lunged forward like he wanted to attack me from the doorframe of his office. He didn’t get far. Both Quinn and Clay had him by the arms.

  “Sorry, P.” Quinn shook his head. “We just let your father know what we know—and that he’s going to be leaving.”

  Tommy stepped around them, getting in my father’s face. “That’s right. No more whatsoever. No Earth. No Mars Station. You are going to get on the first shuttle to the Saturn Station, and you are going to stay there. Indefinitely. If I hear your name ever again, I’ll release all of this to the public, immediately. I’m not now only because of Paloma. There are guards outside to help you on your way, and Graham Alexander says goodbye.”

  And just like that… my father started his last journey… away from everything and everyone he’d always valued the most. I wondered if his so-called friends would miss him.

  I waited until he was gone before I let out the breath I held. “I think we need to take apart this place, piece by piece, and see what secrets my mother didn’t know about that can be found here.”

  Clay nodded. “Agreed.”

  There were lots of things we had to do, lots of plans to make and people to take meetings with. I knew I should be feeling something, anything about my father being forced away. But all I could think about at that moment was relief. Utter and complete… easiness about never having to see him again.

  “Who wants to go find a really good place to have a burger?” Keith grinned at me. “Or something with gooey cheese?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You’re hungry.”

  “He’s always hungry.” Clay laughed. “But yeah, I am now too.’

  “Kicking your dad off Earth took a lot out of us. You should have seen his face with the kid pictures. He wasn’t sick about it, just pissed.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t tell me any more. How about if we all go to what is now our home and I cooked for us?”

  All four of them grinned, and Quinn spoke. “Paloma wants to cook for us, guys. I think she loves u
s.”

  He was right. I loved them so much. I’d follow them anywhere, and someday we would be rid of all the people who stood between happiness and us. Garrison Sandler wouldn’t be shipped off anywhere. He’d see the end of his reign, and anyone who tried to get in our way would live to regret their decisions.

  I still didn’t know Garrison’s story, but I would. I’d help them understand the understandable, and maybe with time, I’d make sense of the senseless. If such things were possible.

  “Come on. Let’s go home.” I extended my hand, and for just a second, all four of their hands touched me at the same time. I could feel the universe move. I’d never fully grasped it before, but all it took was them—Tommy, Clay, Quinn, and Keith. My guys. My loves. My heart. My always.

  THE END

  Thank you so much for reading Loving Them (Wings of Artemis 5). If you have a moment, could you please leave it a review? Doing so helps authors so much! Please look for the conclusion of Paloma’s story in Saving Them (Wings of Artemis 6) coming soon. For more up to date information, join my newsletter at www.rebeccaroyce.com and come to the Wings of Artemis group of Facebook found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/736777976504277/

  Please watch out for the second part of Paloma’s story Saving Them coming soon.

  If you would like more information about the author or to sign up for her newsletter please visit www.rebeccaroyce.com. Also, if you would like to join all the fun on Facebook and talk about Wings of Artemis with other fans please join us here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/736777976504277/

  About the Author

  As a teenager, I would hide in my room to read my favorite romance novels when I was supposed to be doing my homework. I hope, these days, that my parents think it was worth it.

  I am the mother of three adorable boys and I am fortunate to be married to my best friend. I live in Austin Texas where I am determined to eat all the barbecue in town.