Yet, I am unable to muster up even the barest amount of enthusiasm for the act I must perform. I look down at my dijjo, still lifeless underneath the ceremonial cloth, though many months has passed since my cousin’s death in our last great battle with the Kaidorians.
The Three Generation War is over and I have been appointed as Xar, the general of our troops. But I remain stuck in the past. Though my body is here, my realm spirit feels as dead as the cousin I swore to protect when I took him on under my command.
The blaring sound of a holo hail interrupts my spiral into these dark thoughts.
I release a heavy hiss before setting the ridges upon my nose to neutral and swiping my hand across the air to create a screen. It’s P’rm N’Ure, our Kel’s top advisor and my uncle.
“P’rm N’Ure.” Despite our familial connection, I greet him formally, placing a hand to my ridges. This is the way my uncle prefers our communications to be conducted.
His green mouth twists briefly—his version of a smile. “Greetings Xar T’Kaniteton.” He nods back without touching his ridges, an appropriate greeting for a nephew, but not for the general of Xalthuria’s armed forces. “I trust you are prepared to carry out what must be done?”
“Of course.”
Again those thin green lips twist. “I am told that though you’ve had ample opportunity to visit pleasure stations since the end of the Three Generation War, you have not. One of Xalthuria’s greatest warrior’s, a general no less, should have many females sating his needs. You, however, have shunned the comfort females on our planet, and have not visited a pleasure station since your return from the war. Of course, your cousin A’Ry will marry our Kel, but unless our scientists solve the infertility crisis, you are our only hope for a Line Neixal heir.”
I clench my fists at my side but keep my features neutral. I am the Xar, and it would not do to let him see the turmoil his words cause within me. “I will do my duty.”
My uncle narrows his diamond gaze. “Your failure to protect my son has put our family line in an untenable position. Especially since N’Thn only managed to produce a female when he participated in the Breeding Ceremony. I wanted to make sure you understood that before you were cut off from holo communications on that primitive planet.”
“I understand.” My chest tightens. He still blames me for N’Thn’s death but not nearly as much as I blame myself.
“Yes, please ensure that you don’t fail your family line this time.”
“I will not—”
He ends the holo before I can reply but there is nothing I can say in reply anyway.
He is correct. I might have been appointed as Xar. During the ceremony, my lifelong friend and fellow warrior, Kel D’Rek extolled my virtues, citing my many victories and kills. But that does not erase what I failed to do during that last great battle.
I could not save him. My cousin, the one I was raised beside like a brother. And that failure continues to haunt me to this day.
I have been a warrior on autopilot since the war. I do not fuck. I eat, not for pleasure, but to sustain my optimum warrior’s build. I sleep poorly, and when I do manage to slumber for more than an hour or two, I see N’Thn. A Kaidorian horn in his chest, his green face, deathly pale and accusing.
Nothing has given me pleasure since the end of the war, let alone my lifeless diijo. But I did not lie to my uncle. I will not fail in this task.
I reach into the bag of the uniform I brought to change into after the Breeding Ceremony. I will not serve as a member of the Xalling Collection Force during this tour to New Terrhan, but I much prefer my body armor to the ceremonial mating cloths we the males participating in the breeding ceremony are required to wear. I will change as soon as the three hours of fucking are done, and before the fucking begins…
I pull out a small black bottle of ejogi serum. This is the serum we give to males who prefer the company of other males yet still wish to participate in the ceremony to continue their bloodlines. That is not the case with me, but I slip it into the front pocket of my mating cloth, in case the supposedly irresistible scent of the hu’man females’ uncovered breeding slits fails to arouse me.
The indicator light goes off signaling we will be entering the atmosphere soon.
There will be much to do after we land. Normally the doors open, and the Breeding males are simply unleashed on the settlement. Much like a hunt, the males search the village for twenty-one-year-old females eligible for breeding under the New Terrhan accord and then drag them back to the ship for fucking. Every hunter has first rights to whatever female he finds.
But not this solar.
This solar, our newly appointed Kel will be taking part in the ceremony and he has ordered the other Breeding Ceremony males to be kept at bay, while all the females are rounded up.
He claims this is to keep the relatively frail hu’man females from being hurt in the hunt. But as his lifelong best friend, I have guessed the truth.
It has been two solars since his encounter with the hu’man female who dared to spit on him during his observation trip to New Terrhan, but he has not forgotten.
In fact, I suspect he will have the opposite problem to me this trip. I have never been aroused by any of the hu’man females during my previous tours to this primitive planet as a Xalling Collection Force soldier. The Breeding Ceremony is a chore I must undertake to gain a male heir. But as for our Kel, he is obsessed with the hu’man who defied him.
I hope for her sake she does not try to run.
Chapter Three
Zinnia
“Hey, Freak show, going into the woods to make out with your girlfriend?” a voice calls out as Kira and me pass by the corner of the fields closest to the red forest.
Of course, it’s Phil Goggins. Dan’s best friend and his buddies are gathered outside the work hut he received when my brother named him the Co-Fields Manager—or as Kira puts it, The Other Overseer. It looks like they’re playing a game of dice, but Phil must not be too involved in the game. He’s way more interested in smirking at me, his arms folded across his thin chest like he’s daring me to say something back.
It sickens me now to think of the nearly lifelong crush I had on my brother’s friend, all the way up until the night of the February harvest festival.
“Who is that?” Kira demands, her dark brown eyes narrowing as she squints in the direction of the hut. Poor Kira’s mother didn’t get the proper pre-natal care before boarding the colony ship, so now she suffers from myopia, an eye condition that renders people unable to see for far distances.
“It’s nobody,” I answer, walking even faster.
“Hey Phil, double or nothing you can bang the hot, blind one, too. Bet she won’t want Freakshow no more after getting a piece of you.”
Kira jerks to a stop beside me. “What did those pigeon shits just say?”
“Ignore them,” I plead, my face burning hot with shame, as I remember how flattered I’d been when my brother’s handsome best friend had approached me at the harvest festival after years of teasing me about my limp and dark skin.
He’d said he’d always liked me, but hadn’t wanted to go there, because I was his best friend’s little sister. He’d also said he only bullied me to hide his true feelings. But now that he was the co-field manager, he could finally tell me how he really felt—makes no sense, I know. Believe me.
I still can’t believe I’d been so starved for validation, that I’d actually fallen for that crap. But the harvest had just come in and he’d poured plenty of corn liquor into my red clay cup as he complimented me on how smart I was and how he totally thought the leaders should promote me out of the fields and into the colony classroom.
I’d never had a boy talk so nice to me. Plus, all over-eighteen-year-old girls are encouraged to have sex before the Breeding Ceremony. Supposedly, it helped girls to see that sex with humans wasn’t anything like getting bred by a Xalthurian. With the corn liquor warming up my veins, it hadn’t taken much to convinc
e me to “come see” his new work hut. Then do a lot more…
“Don’t look at my leg.” That had been my only condition before I pulled down my underwear and lifted my bark skirt high enough over my good leg for him to gain entry.
“This your first time?” he asked as he climbed on top of me.
“Yes,” I answered, more than a little embarrassed. Most girls my age had boyfriends by now, but Phil was the only one who’d ever shown an interest in me.
“Good,” he’d said, smirking under the light of New Terrhan’s two moons.
I had felt like the luckiest girl alive. But that feeling had been very, very fleeting. The sex hadn’t been good. Like, at all. Mostly awkward and drunken fumbling, until he managed to get himself inside with a painful push. He’d shot his load barely a minute after he started moving on top of me.
Then he’d jumped up and yelled out, “I did it! I banged Freak show.”
His friends had appeared in the work hut’s open window, cackling like witches, and congratulating Phil like he’d withstood ten rotations of latrine duty. I’d fled as fast as my bad leg could carry me, and I’d been too humiliated to tell anyone. Even my best friend.
“I’m tired of that pigeon shit overseer and his asshole friends,” Kira says now, trying to push past me to head toward the guys still snickering around the work hut.
“Kira, no.” I grab her arm. “Remember the plan. We can’t let them derail us.”
It’s a good point, and Kira must realize that. After expelling an angry breath, she backs down with a huffy, “Well, I guess us making out in the woods is as good a cover story as anything.”
“It is,” I assure her, with a sigh of relief. My best friend can be loyal to a fault, and there’s always a fifty-fifty chance she’s going to think with her heart instead of her brain when it comes to assholes.
In fact, part of the reason we’re enacting this plan is because she picked a fight with the wrong Reaper after her sister’s death.
“And the Xalthurians will be here any day now,” I remind her, as I redirect her toward the red woods.
Pointing that out makes Kira walk towards the trees even faster. Like we’re running out of time.
The Xals come every year during the month we New Terrhans still refer to as May, even though there are fourteen months in this system’s year to our old planet’s twelve.
It always went the same. The Xalthurian ship would land and a bunch of their males would come spilling out like animals unleashed. Half the Xals would be dressed in nothing but these loin cloths that barely covered their dicks and the other half would look just the opposite, soldiers in silver body armor that molded to their huge, jewel toned bodies.
We called the soldiers Reapers. They charged through the settlement, taking DNA samples from the female hybrid babies and ripping the male hybrid babies from the arms of their human mothers as was their right under the New Terrhan Accord.
Shortly after our crash on this inhospitable red planet, we’d been discovered by the system’s only other inhabitants, an advanced alien race, called the Xalthurians. On the brink of starvation, our human leaders had struck a deal with the race, whose own females were going through a fertility crisis. In exchange for a yearly allotment of supplies, they got to breed all of our twenty-one-year-old females. If the results of that breeding was a girl, she stayed with us in the settlement. But if it was a boy, they took him back to their planet, never to be seen again.
We called the ones in loincloths Hunters, because of the way they stalked through the settlement, checking the necks of any woman who looked to be close to breeding age. After the accord between our races was made, all New Terrhan females were required to have their birth date marked on their necks with a special stamp only Xalthurians could see without the aid of a UV light. When one of the Hunters found that the neck he was checking belonged to a twenty-one year old, he’d drag her back to the Xalthurian ship for something our overlords call the Breeding Ceremony.
But from what I’ve heard, there’s nothing ceremonious about what they do to the girls on that ship. According to Kira, who heard it from her sister, the caught females are dragged into a round room and taken by as many Xalthurians as possible in the three hours they’re allotted with the year’s “crop” of breeding age females.
The Ceremony is painful and degrading and according to Kira’s sister, severely traumatizing. But it’s what every girl in New Terrhan is raised to expect. We’re taught from the time we‘re old enough to understand that this is something we’ll have to endure for the greater good, since our food is based on our compliance.
However, that won’t be Kira and me.
We both turned twenty-one this year, but ever since Kira’s sister died trying to escape the Reapers who came to take her hybrid baby boy two years ago, my best friend has been concocting a plan to get us both out of the Breeding Ceremony.
A crazy and extremely dangerous plan. During past Breeding Ceremonies, some women have cried and a few had resisted, panicking when one of our alien overlords grabbed them with their clawed hands and threw them over their shoulder. A few have even attempted to run upon seeing the charging hunters. But no one has ever attempted what Kira and I are about to do, and it’s taken weeks of hard work to put all the pieces in place.
That’s the real reason we’ve been spending so much time in the red woods. Not to gather herbs and other medicinal plants as I’d been claiming to my brother.
I do manage to find some fernie on the perimeter of the woods—not nearly strong enough to halt the full pain of a broken wrist. But it’s better than nothing, and it’s the best cover story I could come up with for spending three hours in the woods tonight. Under the light of the two moons, I also keep my eyes out for more plants we can use. But I spend most of the three hours in hard labor, getting water out of the graves we dug for ourselves to hide in when the Xalthurians come. Again. We dug the hiding spaces months ago, but thanks to a particularly rainy growing season, this is the third time we’ve had to bail them out.
But you know what? It’s still better than hanging out at home, watching Dan pretend to feel contrite and listening to his hollow promises to change. I sing some of the more upbeat songs in the Fleetwood Mac catalog to keep Kira and me entertained as we bail out the graves.
“Holes,” Kira corrects sternly, after I tell her I think we’ve gotten the graves just bailed enough to hide in if they don’t dry out before the Xals set down.
She agrees easily enough, though. She also hooks her arm through mine, giving me something other than my stick to lean on during the half mile return walk to the village. But she doesn’t make a big deal of it.
Kira’s such a good friend. Most of the other villagers treat me like Phil and his friends, a walking freak show to be pointed at, since I’m currently our settlement’s darkest and only disabled resident.
Even worse are the folks who treat me like I’m some kind of super sad charity case. The Hunchback of New Terrhan, dragging my deformed leg around, because the ship’s only surviving doctor didn’t have the tools on hand to make a decent prosthetic if he amputated. I’m pretty sure the only reason Jin-Hu, the daughter of our High Leader, is friends with me is because she likes the saintly look being seen out in public with me gives her.
Kira’s not like that though, which is why I feel compelled to tell her what Jin-Hu told me as we walk back. That the Xals do things to the girls who try to run. Bad things they sometimes don’t survive.
But Kira remains committed to her plan and all too soon we reach the red clay house I share with Dan, Nova, and Glee. It’s about twice as big as most of the other houses in New Terrhan, but that still doesn’t make me want to go in.
My leg is throbbing after all that water bailing, and I don’t know what version of Dan I’ll find inside. Maybe he’ll be passed out. Maybe he’ll be in drunken tears, begging Nova to forgive him. Maybe he’ll be yelling at her for “making him” hurt her. His actions have become unpredictable
lately.
And though I try to keep the dread out of my expression, Kira gives me a “what’s wrong” look.
So much...but too much to unload on Kira.
“Dan says the Breeding Ceremony is the only way I’ll ever be able to get a baby,” I decide to answer quietly, choosing the least of the things bothering me.
As I expected, Kira launches into a monologue about how great I am and how Dan’s a piece of pigeon shit.
According to her, the universe will one day deliver a nice guy to settle down with me and start a family. Kira honestly seems to think I’m the most beautiful woman on our planet and that I deserve much more than the Breeding Ceremony.
This is why, I think, after we exchange goodbyes and I start into the house, feeling uplifted despite what might be waiting for me inside. This is why I’m willing to risk my life to help her carry out this dangerous—.
A sudden blast of electronic sound interrupts that resolute thought.
I know what it is immediately, even before looking up to see the circular silver ship hovering in the night sky.
Dear moons…the Xalthurians.
They’re here.
“Run!” Kira screams, behind me.
Chapter Four
T’Kan
“If you have helped her, if you have helped her defy me in any way, I will snap your necks.”
I stand at military attention outside a humble clay house, listening to Kel D’Rek threaten the parents of the hu’man he has become obsessed with breeding. Two solars ago, that very hu’man had dared to publicly lash out at him when we’d come to collect the male infants. At the time, I had been surprised that he did not kill her. Others had died for lesser offenses. And then I noticed that look in his eyes as he’d examined her neck to determine her age.
His To Steal Page 2
