Not for the first time, I wish I had some kind of communication device with which to reach Kira. I can’t just let her walk blind into this mess.
“Any questions?” Phil asks, his tone goading.
My jaw ticks with the urge to tell him exactly what I think about Dan’s decision to not increase maternity leave for new mothers from just a month. But Mom and Dad are still pretty traumatized by losing their real daughters, even if one is now serving as the Qel of Xalthuria. I don’t want to upset them or the baby by getting in an argument with Dan’s right hand man.
“See you at six,” I say between clenched teeth.
I start to close the door, but Phil catches it, slamming his forearm into the red wood as his eyes drop to my newly enlarged breasts. “See you already lost that baby weight, except in the chest. Looking good, Zinnia. Especially now that you’re not dragging that leg behind you. Harvest Festival’s right around the corner, too. Maybe we could hook up again.”
Again…my stomach turns at the memory of him frantically moving on top of me with his tiny dick. Had that only been a year ago? It feels like centuries since I was stupid enough to believe his lies. But apparently I was just really awesome at believing the bullshit guys come up with to get what they want from me. Here and on Xalthuria.
Not anymore though.
“Bye, Phil.”
This time I put my full weight into shoving the door closed in his face, and long for the days when no guy would look at me twice.
Well, there was one guy who had looked at me. More than twice. The memory of T’Kan after he caught me masturbating in his bed, suddenly flashes into mind. The way his cock had strained against his pants leg. For me. My whole body heats as I remember the feel of him inside of me, his dick dragging in and out as he took me slowly at first, then rough. So rough…
“Hey, Zin, you want to feed lil’ grandbaby while I finish the oatmeal?”
I turn to find Kira’s mother—Mom—standing in front of me with Stevie in one arm and the other held out to take the red clay water jug from me.
“Yes, thank you,” I answer, so glad I’m too dark for my blush to be noticed as I hand her the jug before taking my precious baby from her.
She’s already calmed down, even after being jolted awake by Phil’s knock on the door. According to Jin-Hu, who gave birth to a golden boy about a month before me, that’s pretty normal. “These hybrid babies are so good. They barely cry, just hiss and click. So quiet!”
As if to prove her right, Stevie is now making cute little clicks with her mouth, like, “Hey, if you’re not busy, I could eat. But only if you have time.”
“Such a good little baby,” Mom says with a soft chuckle as I put her on my breast. “You’re so lucky you got a girl.”
Her eyes shadow over. Though, Mom loves having a baby in the house, I know the death of her other daughter, Elle, along with the hybrid son she was trying to keep will haunt her for the rest of her life. Most reapings didn’t end that tragically, but even with the new accord, the shadow of having their boy babies taken away still hangs over the settlement.
I remember what came after all of Jin-Hu’s compliments for her newborn baby boy. “Too bad I can’t have full custody of my little one,” she’d said with a sad sigh. “But maybe I can get his father to agree to take me back with him to Xalthuria.”
Maybe….
As much effort as Kira is putting into change, it’s going to take years for everyone to truly adjust to our New World Order. And that’s only if Dan doesn’t find a way to mess everything up.
But I push those thoughts away, and force myself to stay present, pressing a kiss into Stevie’s downy soft gold and black swirled forehead.
“Yes, I’m really lucky,” I agree with Mom. Reminding myself.
While trying not to think of him.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I don’t feel so lucky by the end of my first day back at work—not as a colony ship teacher as Henry had been hinting at before I was stolen from the planet, but picking root vegetables in yet another thriving field.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy we have so many more fields to tend now than we did last year, and even happier we’ve been successfully harvesting all sorts of vegetables and fruit since Second January. But as it turns out it’s way harder to harvest a healthy field than a scant one, especially with a child strapped to your back with bark cloth.
Parts of me I didn’t even know I had are aching by the time sun begins to sink in the sky. Nope, one month of maternity leave just isn’t enough. Another thing to put on the “must tell Kira” list. I also need to talk to her about an official retirement plan for the elders.
I glance over at Kira’s parents plowing in the next couple rows. They’re moving even slower than me and sweating profusely.
“Wouldn’t it be better if we let the older folks stay indoors with all the hybrid newborns as opposed to making them toil in the fields while all the new mothers work with their babies strapped to their back?” I ask Kira’s parents that night as we’re scarfing down a filling meal of ruchi, Xalthurian chicken, and a brown grain we call Xal rice, even though it’s circular and not oblong.
Kira’s mother snorts. “Good luck getting that past your brother. Him and Nova want us out in those fields working just in case Kira’s plan falls through.
“Not Nova,” I insist. “Just Dan. You can’t believe everything he says in those speeches.”
Their brows scrunch but don’t say anything. I almost can’t blame them for not believing me. Dan’s done too good of a job “quoting” Nova in his rest day speeches, so that he comes off as a concerned man of the people as opposed to a frothing at-the-mouth men’s right advocate.
In his speeches, it’s not that he doesn’t want the women who participate in the Breeding Ceremony to receive advanced Xalthurian tech, like dishwashers, waste disposal systems, food replicators, and indoor heating units for the cold season. It’s just that his poor, sickly woman finds it so unfair that because she won’t spread her legs again for the Xalthurians, because she’s chosen to stay faithful to her human mate, she won’t have access to the things that could help her run their household and raise her own hybrid. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Nova was a bitter victim of the Breeding Ceremony, too.
A knock sounds on the door, interrupting my defense of Nova.
“Bestie, come out! Come out, right now! It’s RomCom night at the colony ship!”
I sigh at the sound of N’Maryah’s clicks and hisses outside the door.
I’d vowed to give up RomCom night on the ride back to New Terrhan, but apparently the universe had other plans. Toward the beginning of their shotgun marriage, Wang-Lei had convinced his depressed bride to go to one of the Holiday nights on the colony ship, so that she could understand why we celebrate Wintermas on New Terrhan.
She’d walked onto to crashed colony ship depressed, and come out completely obsessed with old planet entertainments, which had been just fine with Wang-Lei. He loved going to the entertainments, too, but he drew the line at RomCom night. A normal person would have responded to that by either going to the movies by herself or staying home with her husband.
But somewhere over the last four months, N’Maryah had somehow decided I was both her best friend and therefore honor bound to come with her to RomCom night every other week.
“I’ll tell her I can’t go,” I say to Mom and Dad, standing up with the baby. “I’m beat.”
“All the more reason to go then,” Mom says. She stands up, too, and holds out her arms for Stevie. “Here, I’ll put her down while you go talk to your friend.”
“She’s not my friend,” I insist, holding Stevie tighter.
Another brow scrunch. Probably because my “not friend” stops by every other week to go to RomCom night.
As if on cue, N’Maryah loudly clicks, “I don’t like being kept waiting, Bestie!”
I glance at the door, and Mom makes a gimme gesture with her hands, pulling
back my attention.
“I’ve barely got to hold her today,” she complains.
“Me either,” Dad grumbles, shaking his head at me, like I’ve been purposefully keeping them from their grandbaby for a whole twelve hours.
Reluctantly, I hand Stevie over. And lest I think she’s on my side, she clicks happily and nuzzles her golden head into her grandmother’s shoulder.
“Oh poor baby, you missed your grandma, didn’t you?” Mom says in a pointed tone, while shooing me away with the back of her hand.
With a sigh, I grab the bark cloth coat Mom made for me back in First December, since the weather had turned cold, and I no longer had access to anything I’d left behind in my brother’s house.
“There you are,” N’Maryah says when I answer the door. “Why does it continue to take you so long to open the door even though your leg has been fixed?”
Then before I can answer, she takes me by the arm and says, “Come, come, I am in need of advice from my best friend!”
I let her lead me toward the crashed colony ship shining in the distance, but I feel compelled to remind her, “I’m not your best friend.”
“Of course, you are my best friend,” she answers with a dismissive click, which I’ve gotten to know all too well over the last four months. “You are the only one other than your odious brother who understands me. And you introduced me to Wang-Lei. Who else would I consider my best friend on this desolate little planet?”
“Okay, I didn’t introduce you to Wang-Lei,” I remind her. “He’s the only one who volunteered to marry you. And maybe you consider me your best friend, but I can’t ever do the same…you know because you kidnapped my actual best friend and tried to sell her to a bunch of Kaidorians? Remember?”
“Of course, I remember. It was only a half a solar ago. Why would you think I had forgotten?”
It’s actually been over half a solar—eight months to be exact—and N’Maryah still hasn’t managed to recognize rhetorical questions. “My point is I don’t consider you a friend.”
She scrunches her ridged nose, looking honestly confused. “And why does it matter if you consider me your best friend if I have already decided that you are mine?”
I look at her and just give up. N’Maryah is a perfect storm of entitlement and determination, and I’m too tired to keep trying to convince her that friendship should be something based on mutual like.
“You said you needed advice?” I ask wearily.
“Yes, I do need advice,” N’Maryah says, returning the subject back to herself with a happy click. “This morning when Wang-Lei was moving inside of me, my toes curled without warning and suddenly I was assaulted with many pleasurable sensations. When you and my cousin were making the breeding act, did your toes curl? Did you find it pleasurable when he moved inside of you? Or was my unexpected toe curling enjoyment another symptom of this love disease?”
Oh, moons, not this again.
Even more annoying than N’Maryah’s insistence that we were besties (whether I liked it or not) was how shockingly well her marriage to Wang-Lei is going, despite the fact he still can’t understand a word she is saying. Or perhaps because of it.
First it had kicked off with the “kissing conversation,” which N’Maryah had been surprised to find made her feel “not cold” inside. Then it had moved on to Wang-Lei going down on her, something Xal males didn’t bother to do to Xal females, since Xal females felt neither pleasure nor pain during the sex act. N’Maryah, however, had found Wang-Lei’s attentions “strangely delightful.”
Soon after that, N’Maryah had declared herself stricken with the love disease, and now she was apparently starting to feel pleasure during the penetration part of sex.
I was beginning to suspect that it wasn’t that the Xalthurian females derived neither pleasure nor pain from sex, but that they just needed a lot more warming up than us human females did. Yet another thing to add to the Kira list.
“You have still not answered my question, Bestie. Did my cousin produce feelings inside of you like the ones Wang-Lei produced inside of me this morn before our first meal?”
That dream image hits me again. Riding T’Kan in the morning light. Just a dream, I remind myself. Just a dream.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell N’Maryah. “Oh look, we’re here.”
I nod toward the colony ship, still overturned on its side in front of us, it’s landing strip hanging down like a tired tongue. The intergalactic space ship is easily the tallest structure in the settlement and probably would look out of place among the crude clay houses to someone visiting the planet for the first time. But to me, this piece of wreckage, is our settlement’s heart. It’s our only connection to the old planet, and it serves as proof that we New Terrhans came from an advanced society, capable of not only indoor plumbing, but also space travel.
According to the settlement elders, the ship was always meant to serve as a city center, just not on this planet. That’s why it came equipped with living quarters, classrooms, a large library filled with billions of electronic books, and a viewing room built to hold thousands.
Unfortunately, the living quarters had been destroyed in the crash, but as long as one didn’t mind learning, reading, and watching entertainments on a slope, all the other permanent installations ran just fine on the ship’s solar forever battery.
Tonight, packs of young women climb the landing strip, chattering about the evening entertainment, a six episode series about four women trying to navigate their love lives and careers on an international space station.
I try to join the stream, but N’Maryah holds me back, her ridges pointing in the same direction as her down turned mouth. “If you are truly not stricken with the love disease for my cousin, why can you not share with me the intimate details of your sex life with him? You are, after all, my very best friend in the solar system.”
Wow. “N’Maryah, that’s not how friendship works, so will you please stop saying—”
The sound of a piercing electronic blasts cuts me off, and all chatter stops as everyone in the incoming crowd whips their heads toward the sky.
Every human on New Terrhan has become familiar with this sound over the last two decades. It’s the Xalthurians’ way of letting us know they’ve arrived. What Kira used to call knocking on our door.
Kira…
It’s only February and she’s not due back until May. But maybe she decided to come back early? Thanks to my bionic eyesight, I can see the descending ship isn’t a small transport carrier or circular craft like the one used for the Breeding Ceremony. It’s much larger than either of those ships—larger than our colony ship even. It has a top made entirely of glass and…yes! The royal diamond-shaped insignia plastered across it’s metal bottom.
Heart seizing with hope, I pull away from N’Maryah and rush toward the only empty field we have left after our unexpected second shipment of much heartier crop seeds back in First December.
The ship’s setting down, and there’s a huge crowd gathered by the time I arrive at the landing spot on the northern edge of the settlement. Many of the men our chanting, “We won’t get left out in the cold! We won’t be kept down!” And Dan’s already up on the dais, not offering calm words, but standing with his hands behind his back. Like a king waiting for his visitor to arrive.
Oh moons…I frantically push my way to the front of the crowd, knowing Kira will be even more shocked than I was to step out of the ship to this angry mob. And Dan.
This isn’t the New Terrhan she left, and I grimace as the landing strip lowers, wishing I could have warned her ahead of time.
But the landing strip doesn’t reveal Kira and Kel D’Rek when it finishes descending.
The crowd quiets, and a cold weight drops my stomach when I see T’Kan, flanked on each side by several soldiers, all with photon guns strapped to their chests.
The soldiers are all dressed in the usual silver body armor, but T’Kan is wearing a fine red robe, paire
d with loose silk pants. The only thing he has in common with the soldiers at his backs and sides is a tighter than usual top knot.
Someone else must have noted his unusual vulnerability. A male yells “Take this, you damn Xal!” and hurls a red rock straight at the only non-uniformed Xalthurian.
The crowd gasps when T’Kan easily catches the red rock, like it’s a baseball. Looking straight at the man who threw the rock, the golden Xalthurian squeezes his clawed hand around the projectile, and when he opens it, a pile of red dust pours out.
The crowd quiets then, and a few other men with red rocks in their hands lower their arms.
Behind me, Dan takes advantage of the stunned silence, calling out, “I am the High Leader of New Terrhan, and will translate your words to my people. Tell me your name and why you have—”
“People of New Terrhan. My name is Xar T’Kaniteton N’Vaise of the Lines Trexos and Neixal.”
My mouth drops open as several more gasps go up all around me. T’Kan’s voice is amplified, loud enough for even the seniors in the far back of the crowd to hear. And though his tone is much smokier and darker than a human’s, we can all understand him. Because he’s speaking in full on New Terrhan, not a click or a hiss to be found.
“Are you a diplomat? I thought all diplomats were green!” someone in the crowd calls out. The green aliens we call diplomats are the only other Xalthurians any of us humans have ever heard actually try to speak our language.
“No, I am not a diplomat,” T’Kan answers.
“Is Queen Kira with you?” another voice calls out.
“No, our Qel and Kel have not accompanied me on this trip,” he answers.
“Why are you here then?” Dan calls from his dais, forced to shout just like everyone else. He and T’kan both loom over the crowd from opposite ends, but Dan doesn’t have any tech to amplify his voice.
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