by Love, Aimee
I examined everyone I could see. Of them, all but a few of the youngest bore some mark I’d missed before. Missing fingers were the most common but I also found an astonishing number of missing ears hidden beneath shaggy hair. Those with no outward signs took a little longer, but if I watched them long enough I always managed to note some stiffness of movement or favoring of one side over the other that seemed to tell of some hidden ailment. If the problem was so widespread, could one fresh set of genes really help? And then I realized that it wasn’t just fingers and ears and arms that were missing.
I dialed the heat sensor on my implant, even though it made navigating the furniture and the ladder trickier, and stormed downstairs. Quince was absent, which was just as well since I hardly wanted to upset him and Sebastian was the one I’d come to see anyway.
He took one look at my face and his eyebrows shot up.
“What now?” He asked, standing up from the bed.
I had no idea where to begin. I wasn’t even sure what it was I suspected. I only knew that they’d been lying to me long enough and I was tired of it. I strode over to him and he raised his hands up in a mocking defensive posture.
“Remember, you’re on a one slap limit. You might want to save it up until you really need it,” he was grinning.
“Where are all the women?” I demanded.
His playful grin turned to a look of surprise and I saw the heat begin to climb up his neck.
“There isn’t one woman out there,” I told him. “Not a girl in the class at the school. Nothing.”
“And this it the first you’ve noticed that?” He asked, the amusement in his voice sounded forced now and his cheeks and forehead went from red to orange.
“Answer me,” I said, my voice tight.
“We keep them downstairs, chained to beds,” he told me sarcastically. Well, at least that was an obvious lie.
I slapped him.
“What?” He asked, taking a step back. “Wasn’t that the answer you were looking for?”
“Where are they?” I screamed, wishing he were shorter so I could yell it into his face.
“Down in the caves where it’s safe,” he told me, still outwardly calm but boiling inside.
Lies.
“Where are they?”
He took a deep, slow breath and stood impassively. Clearly, as far as he was concerned, the interview was over.
“I think you should go back upstairs and calm down,” he said in a low, dangerous voice.
“Sure,” I snapped. “Just one more thing.”
“What?”
I brought my fist up on his blind side, sucker punching him so hard he fell back against the wall. His expression, when he looked up at me clutching his jaw, looked more hurt than angry. It was a stupid, amateur move and more than a little unsporting, but I felt immensely better for having done it.
“I told you, you only get one,” he said, rising back up to his feet and taking a step toward me.
“That wasn’t a slap,” I told him, then retreated back up to my room. I slammed the hatch with enough force to make the building shake, then pulled the bed over on top of it. I piled the chairs on to it too and, just for good measure, the table. I searched through my little pouch, then kicked myself when I remembered I’d given my wand to Sebastian that morning.
I went into the bathroom, knelt on the floor and pried up the drain. Nobody had noticed that the screws that normally held it in place had gone missing. I raised it up slowly and unfastened the screwdriver, held suspended below it by a thin braid of my hair. I sat in the corner of the bathroom for the rest of the day and all of the night, clutching the screwdriver and nursing a completely irrational hope that he would come up and try to hit me back.
I awoke to the sound of banging from below. Cramped and sore from sleeping in such an awkward position, I stood and stretched, then went to deal with the consequences of my rash act.
I stuck my head under the bed so I could hear better.
“Quince?” I asked hesitantly.
“You wish, lady,” came Sebastian’s barked reply. “Like I’d risk him with you.”
“You know, you’re the only person she’s ever been violent with,” I heard another voice say. “Maybe you should try being nicer.”
Julian. I let out the breath I’d been holding, pushed the bed aside, and opened the hatch. Julian was at the top of the ladder, holding my breakfast soup, with Sebastian glowering behind him, a large, angry bruise on his jaw.
“Good morning,” Julian said.
“Lovely,” I agreed, taking the soup so he could ascend more easily and then pointedly closing the hatch behind him. I set the soup aside and pushed the bed back in place. Julian took one look at all the furniture piled on top of it and burst out laughing.
“You know, I don’t think that would stop him if he really wanted to come up,” he pointed out.
“I know,” I admitted, “but it made me feel better.”
“He said you were pretty upset,” he went on. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I pretended to scratch my ear, dialing up my heat vision, willing to risk getting caught to finally get some answers.
“Where are the women?” I asked.
“Down below,” he said easily. “The weather up here is terrible,” he pointed out, “and the buildings are very old. A few years ago one of the greenhouses went down and three people died. We couldn’t afford to risk them even if we wanted to.”
A slight rise in heat, not enough to indicate a lie but just the right amount for a man confronted by an angry woman wielding a screwdriver. I realized it was still in my hand and pushed it down into my back pocket. His words were perfectly reasonable and completely dissatisfying. Truthful they might be, but that only meant I was wrong about what was going on, not that nothing was.
He stayed a few hours, probably to make sure I wasn’t going to hit anyone else, then claimed pressing business and left.
Quince poked his head up almost as soon as he was gone and motioned for me to follow. I checked to make sure Sebastian wasn’t in, dashed to the bathroom to put my screwdriver back in its place, then followed him down. The truth of it was, I didn’t have any desire to be alone with my thoughts.
He seemed to have just gotten back from getting our lunch. The tray was on the end of the bed, still steaming: two bowls of nondescript soup and a plate with half of a roasted fowl on it. I had no doubt as to who’s was who’s and I felt equal parts of guilt and anger. On the one hand, I was like a piece of livestock, being fattened up for breeding, and on the other, I was taking food out of other peoples mouths for no good reason. No matter how many men I was bullied or beaten into having sex with, the hormone pump inserted in my thigh guaranteed I would be pregnancy free for at least three years.
“Do you want some of mine?” I offered, but he ignored me, turning instead to the big window and pulling back the shutter. The sky was cloudy, and at first I had no idea what he was trying to show me but then I looked closer and gasped.
The sea in front of the city was alive with sails. Large vessels, far bigger than the tiny sled we’d come in on, were plying the waves as far out as I could see.
“What are they doing?” I asked, knowing I couldn’t get an answer.
“Fishing.”
The voice startled me and I turned. Sebastian had come in and was standing beside us. He looked down at me, his face impossible to read.
“For what?” I asked, facing back toward the window. I refused to slink back upstairs and miss all the excitement just because he was here.
“Fish,” he said, as if I were an idiot.
“Not Earth fish,” I said authoritatively. People had been trying to seed other planets with Earth-life for hundreds of years and it never worked. We could grow it in greenhouses
and raise it in carefully controlled pens, but out in the wilds, it was impossibly to recreate an entire food chain, and that was what it took.
“No,” he agreed. “But we still call them fish. They look kind of fish like and they swim.”
“But you can’t eat them.”
“Nope,” he agreed.
“Then why?” I pressed. “It seems pretty dangerous.”
“We can’t eat them,” he told me, “but they’re good for other things.”
He let that hang there, making me guess at what other things he might mean.
“Such as…” I prompted.
He shrugged.
“In the summer, when the pollies spend more time on land, we use the fish to bait the legs away so we can kill the bodies easier.”
“Bait the legs away?”
“You can’t really tell when you see them whole, but the legs and the bodies are two separate kinds of animals.”
“Really?” I asked, intrigued and a little grossed out.
“Yup,” he told me, clearly warming to the subject. “There are actually about a dozen different kinds of legs too. Some have grabbers, some have mouths, they all do a different job and nobody has been able to figure out how the pollies always seem to have the right legs for whatever it is they’re doing.”
“Where are the legs when they aren’t attached?” I asked. “I mean, if there are enough spares hanging around for the pollies to switch them out at will, then they have to have a reservoir somewhere, right?”
He shrugged.
“The ocean is everyones guess, we’ve certainly never seen any loose legs flopping around on the land, but we’ve never pulled one up in a net either, so your guess is as good as mine.”
“Fascinating,” I told him honestly.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “We should call National Geographic. Maybe we can get a grant or something. Think they’d pay us in food?”
Remembering our rapidly cooling lunches, I grabbed one of the bowls of soup and began drinking it before either of them could protest, then went back to the window and watched the little boats hauling in their catches. I was pleased to note that Sebastian divided up my meat and shared it with Quince, but I was only half paying attention.
What I was seeing down below bothered me. There were too many boats risking too many men’s lives for me to believe it was just for bait. Even if they had to fish for them now because they weren’t in season at the same time as the pollies…
“Is it spring now?” I asked suddenly.
“MMM-hmm,” Sebastian mumbled around a mouthful of lunch.
“So you’ll be going to get my luggage?” I asked hopefully.
“Maybe,” he said, suddenly wary. “Why?”
I smiled innocently and put my empty bowl on the tray.
“Just eager to have my things,” I told him and secretly prayed that nobody would look them over too closely.
My little question must have gotten Sebastian thinking, because that night when Julian came a raging debate ensued. The first thing Sebastian did was climb up the ladder and pull the hatch closed, which of course prompted me to climb down from my perch and go over to it and place my ear to the floor.
“...fucking take her with me then,” Sebastian was saying.
“Titus says not,” Julian told him. “He says we can’t risk her. Besides, you wont have a convenient storm to hide you coming in this time. She might be seen. Besides, it’s only a day out and back. I promise not to let her bring down civilization as we know it while you’re gone.”
The confirmation that they had been driving me around in circles those first few days, waiting for the weather to cover my arrival, was mildly gratifying.
“That is exactly why you can’t be trusted to watch her,” Sebastian snapped. “You don’t realize how dangerous she is.”
Julian’s voice went suddenly cold.
“I think I know the dangers as well as you,” he said carefully. “Better even, since I see them every day.”
“Stand there and look me in the eye and tell me there’s no danger. Better yet, tell Quince. At least I deserved what I got. What did he ever do to anybody?”
“This isn’t a democracy,” Julian said. “You don’t get a vote. If you want to argue it with Titus, feel free, but I wouldn’t want to be you at the next counting if you do. Just because you aren’t on the rolls, doesn’t mean he can’t have you fill in for someone else.”
And now I got to wonder what the hell a counting was? God, every time I thought I was getting close to an answer, I just came up with more questions.
I heard a footstep and realized, almost too late, that the discussion was over and Julian was on his way up. I dashed over to the bathroom and pulled the door closed. When I heard him come up I counted to ten and then ran the water, washing my hands and splashing it against my face. I looked in the mirror and swore I could see the worry lines forming on my forehead.
“What was so hush-hush?” I asked, knowing it would be counterproductive for me to pretend I wasn’t at least a little curious.
“We’re out of antibiotics, so Sebastian and Quince are going out onto the ice to get the last two shipments of supplies. We can’t pick them up during the winter, because the big sleds tip over easily in storms.”
“And nobody else can go?” I asked. Surely Sebastian and Quince weren’t the only ones who could drive the things.
“We have other crews,” he told me, plopping down into a chair, “but when they got to the container you came down in, they might wonder why there was an empty coffin and a box of women’s clothing waiting for them.”
“Good point,” I admitted.
“Anyway, Sebastian seems to think that if he leaves for a few days, you’re going to kill me in my sleep and overthrow the government.”
“Oh, that again,” I said jokingly. “I’d have thought he’d figured out by now that if I turn homicidal, you won’t be the one I set my sights on.”
He grinned. “Good to know.”
Sebastian and Quince didn’t leave for a week, but they started getting ready almost immediately. I perched in the corner of their room, careful to stay out of their way, and watched them check and recheck equipment, mend holes in gloves, and bring in more bins filled with supplies than they could possibly take with them. I didn’t want to get kicked out, all the bustle and activity was a welcome change of pace from watching strangers half way across the colony clean out the rabbit pens, but I finally couldn’t keep my curiosity under wraps any longer.
I looked into one of the bins, shocked at what I saw there.
“Why are you taking all this booze?” I asked.
“That’s not for us,” Sebastian told me without looking up from what he was doing. “It’s for you.”
“Me?” Did he really think I needed a case of alcohol to get me through a few days?
“Jules gets cranky when he’s thirsty,” Sebastian said sarcastically, “and I’m locking you in. Don’t worry. I’m leaving plenty of food too.”
“What?” I blurted.
“I said, I’m leaving you here alone with a drunk and baring the door from the outside,” he clarified.
The fact that Julian liked to drink wasn’t really a surprise. Even when he didn’t bring a bottle with him, he always had his flask in his pocket, but our being locked in was certainly news.
“What if there’s a medical emergency?” I asked.
“Then someone else will deal with it,” he told me simply, “or Titus can walk up and unbar the door.”
“What if there’s a fire?” I asked.
He tossed me a coil of rope.
“If you’re gonna talk, you’re gonna work,” he told me. “Check that for fraying.”
I put it in my lap and began to
carefully unwind it, running my hand along it to check for any irregularities.
“So what if there’s a fire?” I persisted.
“That would suck,” he admitted, unconcerned.
“What if one of us gets sick?”
“Then it’s a good thing you’ll have a doctor around,” he said.
“What if Julian gets sick? What if he drinks too much and falls down the ladder and hits his head?”
Sebastian stopped what he was doing and looked up at me.
“That’s not going to happen,” he told me sternly, jerking his head toward Quince. I looked over and saw the boy watching me, his eyes wide with fear.
“Probably not,” I agreed hastily.
Later, when I’d finished checking over an entire pile of ropes and darned the holes in three pairs of socks, a skill Sebastian actually seemed to approve of, Quince went out to get our dinner. As soon as the door was shut I stared at Sebastian until he got tired of pretending he didn’t notice and finally looked up.
“What?” He demanded.
“What if the heat goes out or the lamp dies?”
He sighed.
“Then it’ll be cold and dark. Is this what you do all day, sit around and think of all the bad things that might happen?”
“It beats focussing on all the bad things that already have,” I told him petulantly.
“No wonder you’re so neurotic.”
Sebastian was right about one thing, Julian was a drunk. He drank at breakfast, lunch and dinner and also at regular intervals in between. It didn’t really bother me. He wasn’t an angry drunk or a sad one and, unlike most men I’d known, it didn’t make him grabby. He just drank.
After the first night, I realized why Sebastian hadn’t trusted him to keep an eye on me. He paced himself all day, drinking without ever seeming to get drunk, but after it got dark he took the training wheels off and really got to work. He managed to go from mostly sober to really drunk and then straight through to unconscious in about an hour.
