"This is so bizarre," Maeve said. Diem wanted to watch her say it again.
"We all have our own lot of land within the dividing wall," Breathe giggled as she saw the confusion on Maeve's face. "The wall is a giant, skyscraper of a thing that separates all our lots. Twists between them like a snake. There are only 300 or so occupants in each House, except for Ice House. They have always been the largest House. Journey and I have always said it's the cold—they preserve the surplus eggs that way—that makes them cuddle more."
"Why don't the Houses just all come together? You know, safety in numbers? Everyone under one roof?" Maeve asked. Diem chuckled at the thought of him and Span living under one roof. Without the roof blowing off.
"I believe the Plutians like to keep us divided, competitive. But we mingle at House parties, like the one going on at our House, the Fly House, tonight. The trouble is, we have a very intimate race now and although it is slowly growing, it's still small enough that we all know one another too well to be able explain you."
"I see," Maeve said tightly. Diem thought that maybe she could see why he was worried now. "If these Plutians find me here, what will happen?"
"They won't find you, not here," Diem said. His voice was as sure as the foot he planted on the floor. "Our overseer is frightened of my dragon. I will give her the command to guard the shack, so he cannot come near it."
"But, if the Plutians do find me," Maeve pondered out loud as Diem's brow bolted down over his eyes and his lips hardened in an unamused line. He'd done it to staunch the idea, but it seemed there was no staunching anything this woman decided to do or speak of. "What is the worst that could happen?"
"If they couldn't place you, they'd assume you were a spy from another planetary system and kill you," Breathe said gently. "That would be the worst and possibly the only outcome to it."
Diem saw how the walls seemed to get a little closer for Maeve. She froze, but there was no fooling him. He watched her struggled to keep her cool and breathe at the same time.
"So I'm supposed to sit out here forever?" she said. Her tone climbed faster than Forge sailing into the sky.
"It sounds dismal, doesn't it?" Breathe said. Then to Diem, "She shouldn't be left out here alone. We could each take our turns coming to stay with her."
Great, babysitting. This was too far. Diem had a million things to tend to and he really didn't want anyone else at his shack—or maybe it was really that he didn't want anyone else at his shack with her—besides him.
"And," the old woman went on, as she crooked an eyebrow at her grandson, "you could probably use some help with that new hoarde Forge is fostering, couldn't you?"
Diem groaned. "I don't want you involved in this, Breathe. Not any of you."
"Well, that's not the way it's working out, now is it?" she said. She smiled at him. "So let's think up a schedule that will work. You can teach Maeve to handle the dragons, Diem. She has the metal for it. She would be a wonderful fit, I think."
Diem grinned dryly at his Gra's archaic, but the old word sounded tough and bright and those things definitely seemed to describe Maeve. But then, a lot of things seemed accurate of Maeve.
The colors in Maeve's hair made her more fitting of a dragon analogy to him; the highlights that danced like flames in the light of the cabin. Yes, she was a fiery woman, but he was a dragon handler. It made his cock jump, thinking of what it would be like to handle Maeve, to tame her and train her and make her his. He wondered if Maeve's guarded nature could be broken, the way he had once broke Forge, the most unruly of all dragons and now the most loyal to him. It would take all the patience and determination he had.
Catching up with his mind, Diem took a step backward in surprise. He didn't need to be thinking of a woman this way. He was a Rha, with an entire House relying on him to provide and protect. He couldn't be so focused in on the needs of one person, even if the needs were his own. He had to think clearly and he was already getting muddled with vicious thoughts of her wanting for anything, of her being taken by some other Houseman.
And even as he was providing for her now, she was still lying. She'd lied about having walked for days to get to his private grounds. The shack was out in the back corner, the Fly House lot being egg shaped, with the Fly House nearly in the middle and the grounds with the shack at the top point of the oval. The regular training grounds were in the lower, thicker part of the egg-shaped lot. Maeve could not have possibly passed by the Fly House without being noticed and there was no other way to the shack. Even walking the perimeter, she would've run into the wall guards on either side and neither direction was more than three hours of walking to reach the Fly House. She came from somewhere she wasn't willing to disclose.
Yes, she was a liar.
Yes, he knew it.
And yes, despite everything, he still wanted her all to himself, to see what kind of heat she was capable of throwing at him.
***
It seemed crazy to Maeve that she couldn't just blend in easily with her own race. It didn't seem unreasonable to her at all to be able to return with them to this Fly House place and hang out there with the other humans. She thought of the streets of New York, or any city she'd known, where most people were anonymous faces passing one another on the street. But then again, she'd never been one of those people either. She'd been on magazine covers, TV, she was hounded by the photogs. It was ironic that she'd escaped a whole lifetime, yet she was still a celebrity of sorts. A face that would never blend.
It angered her in an odd way. What was so hard about asking the people Breathe and Diem lived with and ruled, or whatever they called it, to accept her and hide her identity from the Plutians? How hard could it be to ask them to have Maeve's back against the aliens who were obvious enemies?
But, then again, when had anyone in her own race ever had her back?
The thought rattled up the sharp memory of Popi with a pointed tang. The sweet old man had ran the ancient hardware store next door to the tattoo shop where Maeve had worked. Popi had brought Maeve coffee on Mondays and called her Sunshine and treated her like she was anyone, instead of someone with a private life he could read about. Maeve adored him.
Popi was an angel of an old man and he was also the one who sold a story about her to the tabloids. It was the worst ever, a complete fabrication of their relationship, claiming that they were having a sordid love affair. Popi provided the mag with candid selfies he'd shot with Maeve after bringing her coffee, along with crude details of acts between he and Maeve that she couldn't have dreamed up even if she'd been a subscriber to a hard core porn channel. And Popi did it all for a couple hundred bucks.
He had had her back, alright. He'd had a hold of it as he stabbed through it with a few dozen knives, at least.
No, Maeve would keep the Archivers her secret for now.
"Sounds like babysitting and I'm not a baby, so, no thanks," Maeve said. The two seemed to have forgotten she was sitting there, as they worked out her daycare schedule. Diem glanced up with a bit of a scowl. God, he couldn't stand having her around, could he.
"It's the only way to keep you protected," he said through his teeth. Such a handsome man and all she was to him was a burden. Fuck no. She wasn't about to have any man thinking he had to do a damn thing for her, much less that she'd want him to.
"Oh yeah? Well I can protect myself, junior. I've gotten this far on my own and I think I can get the rest of the way without you just fine," Maeve shot back at him.
"What does this junior mean?" Diem snarled at Breathe. "What kind of insult is it? I am the Rha and a man and I will not have a woman disrespect me!"
Maeve stomped across the room to him, meeting him with her face almost flush to his shoulder. She tipped up her chin and let him have it with both barrels.
"I am a woman," Maeve blazed in his face as she struck his chest with her index finger, "and you are only a man. You have to earn my respect, Junior! You can get started by blowing that big fat attitude of yours right out o
f your ass!"
The shock on Diem's face would've made Maeve laugh, if she wasn't so furious. But Breathe did it for her.
"Yes, that's the real Maeve Aypotu," the old woman said. "She's a feisty one, Diem. She's right. We need to do better by her than steal her independence."
"You're going to agree with her?" he roared "We are supposed to jeopardize our safety for her independence?"
"I am agreeing with both of you," Breathe said. She was the only one in the room who was still calm, tapping her finger on her lip in thought. She held up the finger. "Hold House may be willing to help us. They might consider vouching for Maeve as a sister or a cousin from their group. Their House is certainly the most reclusive and they have never brought everyone to House Parties to socialize. They would be the most likely House to have some faces that haven't been met."
"Yes, but why would they bother to get involved?" Diem said. Maeve was still butted up under his chin, but he ignored her as he looked at his grandma. "They keep to themselves; they don't even deal in the Hope Market."
"Oh now," Breathe said, "What does that matter?"
"They don't want to be involved. They do with what they have. There won't be anything we have that they will want enough that I can bribe them to help."
"Ahhh, Diem, you are a wise Rha, but never forget that there is always so much more to learn," the old woman said with a sly smile. "You are absolutely right that the Hold House won't take your bribes. They're not that kind of people." She chuckled. "I learned that the first time I met them, after the Scorching."
"You met them in the Scorching? There are more of us from back then? How many people made it through that?" Maeve said. It was like a family reunion, the prospect of meeting distant relatives for the first time. Breathe's eyes darted around the room as Diem went to the door. He opened it, gave a whistle that swooped in the middle, and closed the door. He nodded to his grandmother.
"It is safe to tell," he said. "Forge is watching for any Plutians."
Breathe settled back on the bed, her spine against the wall.
"There are some. Those were horrendous times, as I've already told you Maeve, but I have to remind you, must be careful when we speak of it." Breathe said. "You've heard the story, but to tell of the emotions in that story, well, we must hide it on penalty of death. The Plutians scoured our information systems before the Scorching and learned our language; they learned a great deal about us, but they fail to fully understand human nature, our slang, and our sarcasm. Thank God.
"You will hear these children..." Breathe hooked a soft finger to indicate Diem, but when the old woman looked back at Maeve, Breathe chuckled to herself. "Children. You still look like one of them, yourself. I should've been down in that Archive with you.
"The children know as much as we could teach them of what our world used to be, but in the beginning, on this new Earth, there was little time for teaching. We had grown so afraid to look outside, when the Plutians lifted our tent, it was like we were moles. My own children and I huddled together, along with Eon's parents. The first thing I remember was the smell of fresh air."
She inhaled as if the memory brought pain with it, but she continued. She closed her eyes with a deep inhale and her face relaxed as she filled her lungs and she continued on with the memory.
"When I could open my eyes, I saw what is here now. A whole landscape I didn't know, foliage I didn't recognize, and people—there were people, huddled, just like us—all around. I heard so many languages, ones I recognized as being from all around the globe. They whispered in their foreign tongues from all around me, but I could only understand one thing. We were all frightened.
"But we were put to work from the moment the Plutians removed our tents. We came to use English because it was the most common language among us. They explained what we were to do and divided us into the five Houses that we still have today. We became the slave labor, harvesting dragons for Pluto's dragon trade. They have a commerce among the planets, trading these animals to planets that desire protection. They are the pit bulls of our day, if you remember the reputation of those dogs." The old woman, catching sight of her grandson, chuckled again. "The children don't know what Earth was like. They can't fathom such a thing as a dog."
Diem only knotted his arms over his chest and leaned a shoulder to the wall, still listening. But Maeve found Breathe to be everything she'd been needing. Someone who remembered what normal was like, someone who understood where she'd come from because they'd been there too. It was like being home again, just listening to the old woman speak.
"Each House has a Plutian overseer," Breathe went on, "and in the beginning, we hated them so deeply, so we named them after our old curses. Any sign of disrespect we could heap on them, we did. Not that it lightened our loads any, but it does help us to remember our pride in our Earth and our race.
"The Plutians only know what they read from our data bases. We spelled the nicknames to them and they scanned for them, but couldn't find them, so they were accepted. Some of them considered it our charming quirk, as if we were their pets who adored them. Some barely tolerated it, but with our joyful persistence, and even without it, so long as our words remained polite, they did not understand sarcasm, so they all eventually came to believe that the names were a compliment, instead of exactly what they'd first suspected.
"But we cannot swear in the Plutians’ presence because of it. Hell and damn are the only slightly acceptable curse words left of the archaic, and our children have added their own new words in their place.
"Other than work, there is little to tell of what occurred after the Scorching. The Houses were here for us to inhabit and we began our new lives in them together, many of us not understanding one another. It was an enormous problem in a very short amount of time, since we had to work somewhat with each other to do the business Pluto had given us to do. Other languages still exist, but many have slowly fallen away. We are the story of the Tower of Babel, in reverse."
Maeve sat beside Breathe, trying to soak it all in. It was all too fantastic for her to fully absorb. Dragons and Plutians, a scorched Earth and a whole generation that never even knew what it was like to live the way Maeve and Breathe had once lived. No cars or TV or tabloids. No fast food or apartments or nail polish. She tried to grasp how everything she once knew could be gone now. Forever and ever gone.
"Yes," Breathe said, moving to drape an arm around Maeve's shoulders. "I see it in your eyes. That was the way I felt too, after the Scorching. The shock of losing everything we had and knew. But you will be fine, Maeve Aypotu, you will be fine. You are a strong woman and you will be fine."
Maeve was suddenly unsure of how strong she was. Just because Breathe knew the tabloids’ portrayal of Maeve's life, it didn’t mean Breathe knew Maeve’s capabilities at all. Maybe Breathe was assuming too much, based on her folded paper talisman and recollection of tabloid stories.
Maeve realized who she was, the curtain lifted, and what she saw was only a failed trust fund baby and a girl suited up for battle against the world, inside heavy, buckled shitkickers. The weight of it threatened to bow Maeve's shoulders.
Maeve kicked back her spine at the thought. She would not bend to the what ifs and assumptions. She couldn’t. Maybe she'd actually been training all her life for this. Maybe her piercings and tattoos and leather outfits were all the armor her subconscious had always known she would need to make it through all of this. After all, she was the one who was here now. She was a survivor, and whether or not it was coincidental, she was here, and she was going to face what was coming at her, like she always did.
"Yes, that's it," Breathe encouraged her with a squeeze to Maeve's shoulder. "You're going to be just fine."
"You said Hold House could help, Gra?" Diem asked.
"Yes, I believe the Rha of Hold House would help," Breathe said, a grin fixed to her soft skin. She divided her eye contact between the Maeve and Diem, skipping back and forth as her words were intended for one or the oth
er. "You are correct that they cannot be bought, Diem. The Hold House's Rha is named Shown. His House occupants are diligent workers and honest. If any of our Houses could be considered happy, I suppose Hold House's occupants are the closest to it."
"I see Diem's point then," Maeve said and she felt his eyes snap to her. "Why would they consider putting their necks on the line to help me?"
"Because they are what we used to call good people."
Good people. That was a shot in the dark. Maeve had known so few good people. Her gut told her that Breathe and Diem were good, but Maeve's gut had never been all that reliable. What if these people ended up being people she actually knew? Her long-lost caregiver, Agnes, or Popi the traitor, or even one of the guys from the tattoo shop? It was against the odds, but wasn't the whole Earth against the odds now?
"Do you know what the Rha's name was, before the Scorching, Breathe?"
"Oh," Breathe's eyes squinted as they rolled to the ceiling. She tapped her lip again. "What was Shown's original name? It's been so long since I thought of it...wait, I do know the original names of two in his House. Generation and Nature still use their archaic names like pet names for each other. His name was originally Garrett and hers was Nalena. The Rests, no...The Reeses. Yes, they were the Reeses."
***
"Do you know them?" Diem leaned in, hoping Maeve recognized the names. He couldn't stop himself. He wanted her to be happy. To feel safe.
But Maeve frowned.
"No," she said. "I wish I did. I can't imagine a total stranger, no matter how good they are, risking anything to help me out."
The Fly House (The UtopYA Collection) Page 20
