by Celeste Raye
She set off again, her smile widening as others called out greetings to her. A young woman carrying a basket filled with small rocks drew up close. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
Jenny’s head went up and back, and her eyes scanned the blue sky overhead. That wild sense of elation that filled her every single time she saw that endless blue dome rocketed through her. It was so beautiful!
How had she ever lived without seeing the sky?
How had she managed to shunt aside the very real and very human longing for the sight of the sun and stars, the clouds and the things that flew across the heavens?
Back on old Earth, she had never seen the sky at all, not even once, except in a book her mother had. Jenny had stared at the book’s illustration for hours on end and for years, always trying to work up the courage to sneak above the tunnels where she and others of her station were forced to live—and always failing. She had always wanted to see that sky, and she had never had the bravery to actually attempt to do what it would take to do so.
And with good reason.
Back on Old Earth, she had lived Below, down in the underground section of the city where the poorest people lived. To go above ground, to risk stepping out of the place where she had been born and consigned due to her class and birth circumstances, meant risking death.
Actual death!
Only those who were wealthy or important and the few of those who lived Below who were allowed to work on the surface had ever seen the sky. They often told stories about it, and tales of what the parks looked like, what the air smelled like. Real air, and not recirculated air brought underground by the massive vent fans.
Her own mother often went above, but hers had been a clandestine visit every time and, in the end, that had cost Jenny’s mother and her father their lives. Jenny had never been able to ask them; they had been executed, and she had gone into hiding to avoid being executed simply because she was a family member, but she was positive, now that she had the ability to see the sky and feel that air on her face, to feel earth and grass below her feet, that both of her parents would have said that death was worth it.
They would have had other reasons for thinking that too though.
As she walked, the grass brushed against her bare legs. Little insects raced away from her and the songs of the winged ones above trilled out into her ears.
How could she have ever lived without knowing those things?
“Jenny?”
A guilty smile filled her face. “I’m sorry. I was just enjoying the sky so much that I forgot I had not answered you, Oliina. It is so very beautiful.” She eyed the basket. “What are you doing today?”
“I’m working on a new room of the hut.” Oliina’s smile went dazzling. “We are expecting a child.”
“Oh!” Her first instinct was to say maybe Oliina should not be carrying such a heavy load. Then she recalled that for Oliina’s race, it was the males who carried the children and birthed them. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you. Have a good day.”
“You too.”
Jenny looked upward again as she crested the last of the hills and began to wind her way down toward the buildings she was working in that day.
She had her very first glimpse of how vast the world was outside her Below home where she had been when she had woken up from the cryo- chamber she had been placed in by armed Capo officers.
She had been convicted of a crime she had never committed. Which was just to say that the Capo had spotted her one day and decided she would be perfect for a bride ship.
A bride ship was a ship that carried human women to outlying planets where women were in short supply. No woman ever actually agreed. Most of the women on the ship had been criminals, or they had simply been pawned away by their fathers or their husbands if their debt had not been repaid.
Or they, like her, had been accused of some petty crime and convicted without even a trial then hustled onto the ship and told they would make a good bride and then sent into cryo-sleep to, in the soldier’s words, make the trip easier.
Really the purpose behind the cryo-chambers was to keep them from being able to resist their new status as brides.
Of course, that had been a lie.
They had been earmarked for delivery to a pleasure planet where they would have been sold to brothels and forced to work off a ‘debt’ that would never lessen, and they would never be able to free themselves of. If it had not been for the wrecking crew that had taken the ship, she might very well be stuck in some pleasure palace right then—and still unable to see the sky!
The Federation knew, of course, that the ship was carrying them to a different destination than the one they had been told they would be arriving at.
The Federation knew, and had always known, what happened to the women that were placed on those ships. The Federation profited from those bodies and women, and they always had.
And the Federation always lied.
Always.
There was rebellion all across the universe at the moment. The Federation was fighting for its very survival. Many beings were tired of being subjugated, of being cast into class systems and depressed due to their species or gender.
She knew that, but that seemed so far away at the moment.
Revant Two was a private planet with little tech or communication with the larger universe. It was a simple place, and it had been designed to stay that way so that it could grow and thrive at a more natural rate. Its resources were plentiful, but it was near no wormholes or trade routes. It had little to offer to any who would plunder it. The nearest planet was also held by survivors of the death of the original Revant system, and they too shunned tech and other things that would make their planet appealing for space and land pirates.
They had no trade interests, no import or export products. They had no fleets but for the few ships piloted by very little, and those ships did bring in needed supplies. They needed supplies because the planet had so little to offer to any advanced race. This made it even less likely to be plundered.
It was the first time in her entire life that Jenny had felt any kind of safety and comfort. It was the first time that she had ever felt like she belonged in the world and that she had a place based on not who she was born to but what she was capable of, and her smile grew wider and longer as she moved forward, heading down the steep hills and away from the small hut that she lived in, and had helped to build as well.
The fact that she had wound up there, on that planet purchased by four brothers, the last of a royal bloodline that had once ruled over a large section of a planet now gone and dead, still seemed so far-fetched to her.
That she did belong, that she would never be forced to live in the stale air and dimness of the Below ever again: it still seemed like a wild dream, a fever dream, and she often prayed that if it was just a dream that she be allowed to sleep forever.
It often did feel like it wasn’t even real. There were times that she would wake up in the middle of the night and find herself having to concrete herself into her current place and situation by taking stock of everything in the small hut that she now lived in.
The hut was mean and simple, made of nothing more than stacked stone carefully mortared with mud and roofed with simple straw held down by cornerstones. But it was the first place she had ever been that was truly hers. Nobody had assigned it to her. There was a small window that let in light and stars shine.
The bed was a simple pallet structure, but it was the finest she had ever had. There were several shelves on the wall, and she was forever finding small things that she found beautiful, and she placed them on the shelves with real pride and often stood at the shelves looking at the small stones, the hollowed out bird’s egg, the seashells, and the delicate and abandoned bird’s nest with true appreciation and joy.
Sometimes, looking at those things, she would first shiver with joy and then the terrible fear that they were not real, that none of this was real and that at any m
oment she would wake again, in the six-by-ten-foot room that had been home to her and her family since her birth. The space assigned to them had been small because her father had a labor job and her mother had as well. They earned very little credits, and many of them were taken before the pay dates even arrived. The Federation took their taxes and their due for the space they occupied. They had to pay a tariff for the air pumped into the Below, for the power grids, and everything else the Federation regulated and gave, or withheld for lack of credits.
There had rarely been enough left over for anything beyond the nutro-loaf and coarse bread that so many who lived Below subsisted upon.
Her entire life had been drudgery and darkness. Was it really possible that she had escaped that?
Even when she was awake, there was many a moment when she would have to pinch herself or ground herself into her present reality by dipping her fingers into the grass or the river or by stepping into the ocean.
That last was what kept getting her in trouble.
The sea drew her in a way she could not explain. The water at the shore was shallow and warm and salty, and she would stand in it sometimes for hours just letting it lap against her ankles and legs. She had not known that it would rise so suddenly and that it could carry her out into the depths of the ocean where she would most assuredly drown and die until it had almost happened.
Marik had seen her being dragged away by the tide and he had rushed in to save her, but he had not been happy about the situation. In fact, he called her a silly little idiot.
Marik.
Her heart gave a powerful contraction as she thought about him. He was tall, taller than any human she had ever seen. He stood at least seven feet tall, and his shoulders were broad from so many years of working as a slave in the mines on a mining planet. His arms rippled with muscle, as did his chest. His waist was lean and narrow and his stomach flat but also thick with muscle. His legs were long, and everything about him sent her senses staggering every time she thought about him.
She could not continue to indulge in the small daydreams and fantasies that sometimes leaped into her mind at the sight of him. Unlike his brothers—Renall, Jeval, and Talon—Marik’s eyes were a deep brown. They had a way of looking right into hers and making her feel as if he was seeing things that she would rather he did not see.
Unlike his brothers, he had a gentle air about him despite his massive size and the scars from battle etched across his face and arms. Talon especially frightened her. He was no longer on the planet; he was gone somewhere, probably wrecking Federation ships or engaging in some bloody battle along with one of the women who had also been on the ship with her: — Jessica.
Jessica was a Capo at one point and one of the law officers whose job was to keep order on old Earth.
Old Earth was in chaos. The war had begun there and rebellion had been vicious. Much of the planet had been destroyed centuries before and now even more of it was gone due to the war between the Gorlites, the Federation traitors, and the humans and those who had assisted them during that uprising.
The uprising that Jessica and Talon had started!
The very idea of all that fighting made Jenny shudder. Her soul was too gentle and she knew it. Her heart quailed at the very idea of war.
And why wouldn’t it?
She had watched her parents be dragged away, kicking and screaming and begging for their lives, by Capo officers when it had been discovered that her mother had found a way to first collect and then plant seeds in small containers that she hid along no longer used corridors of the Below.
Those small plants, mere herbs and the occasional vegetable, had sometimes been the only thing that stood between them and starvation or illness.
That small bit of freshness from those herbs, that green and textured crispness, was often all that stood between Jenny and despair. It was the knowing that there was something that could grow down there after all that made it better.
And the herbs did prevent illness. Her mother had also managed to first collect and use and then grow things that could create medicine. Her mother had been daring enough to go above ground to get the things that she needed. She had done so with the help of a book that she had Jenny memorize, teaching her how to read from it and how to identify things from it before Jenny was barely old enough to talk.
Her mother had used those things to feed them and quite a few of the people who lived Below. She had used the things that she collected from her excursions, illegal and dangerous as they were, above ground to make medicines that would help those who were in need. She gave the medicine to healers and to those who could not afford to go to the pharmos.
But in the end, it had been a healer who had turned them in. A healer who had been so desperate to save his own life and to get the treatment that he needed for the disease that was killing him that he had gone to the Capo and betrayed her mother.
Her father had, of course, attempted to intervene, to save the life of the woman that he loved. His own death had been assured by that. Jenny had been held back by concerned neighbors and Ben, the man she had been engaged to.
Ben’s strong arms had wrapped around her, and his warm breath had washed across her cheek and ear as he had whispered, “You cannot save them, Jenny. You will simply die too. You must stay with me.”
She had stayed with him. Not only because he was right but because she could not bear to witness the public execution in the center of the Below’s business district.
That was how the Federation operated. They made examples of people who were simply desperate and starving. They killed them but not before they tortured them to try to discover if there were any others engaged in the same activity that they had been caught in.
Her parents had known quite a lot about what happened there, but they had kept their silence. They were stronger than she would’ve been; Jenny was sure of it. She had heard of what happened to people in the interrogation rooms, and she was sure that even if she had not known any of the things that the Capo asked, she would’ve made some things up in an effort to end the torture.
The sound of the wind rushing toward her, flattening the grass and making the leaves of the tall trees rustle and clatter together, the hushed roar and murmur of the ocean on the shore and the sound of the flying creatures above as they called and sang while they made their way across the sky, jerked her out of that terrible past and into the present.
Her eyes went to the small buildings erected along a shining stretch of sandy earth. Everyone was given a job. Everyone did whatever work they felt called to do or were capable of doing. She had yet to find her niche, and so she kept getting bounced from one task to another.
She did not really mind that. She had discovered that she enjoyed learning things and not having one specific skill meant that she was accruing quite a few.
Her mood soured though as she considered that she was now being sent to the buildings where Marik tended to the ill and injured.
Marik was a natural healer. She knew he had abilities beyond any that she could imagine and that working with him would be an honor. There were many who had tried and who did well. Not that many stayed on because Marik had said that their skill level wasn’t quite up to what it should be in the case of emergency. That while they knew simple healing that would stand them in good stead if someone was injured while they were working on another task, and they could help them there, he would prefer to continue to try out new people.
It was not just that Marik was hard to please. He and his siblings had decided that it would be best if everyone knew some simple healing. At the moment, it was only the small town made up of less than seventy-five huts and a few other buildings on the planet.
That would change though; there would be new life born of those who were already there, and others would come. The population would spread out, and healers would be necessary in every place, even if all they knew how to do was tend to the smallest and mildest of injury and illness.
She was
fairly sure, given her background, that she would enjoy the work if only she did not have to see Marik!
Her feet, bare and browned by the sun, carried her through the soft grass and wildflowers. There was a small track, barely visible, running through that grass now. The track had been made by feet, not by tools and she regarded it as she went.
How long would it be before massive cities like the ones on Old Earth took over this planet as well?
None of them wanted that. Not the siblings who had purchased that planet and brought what remained of their families and those most loyal to them there. Not those who would come along. She did not want that either. She liked the fact that things were so simple there.
Jenny knew that it would happen eventually, but she hoped that it would be a long time in the future. Every day was a struggle for survival, but she was used to that. The struggle there on Revant Two was a vastly different struggle than the one she had known on Old Earth.
On Revant Two, everyone shared. Food was distributed equally and evenly. Those who could not hunt or gather or go out onto the waves of the ocean and boats were not denied food because they too had a purpose and a task and everything and everyone contributed to the whole.
On Old Earth, the struggle was for power and just to live. The death of those who had less was so common that those who lived in the Below rarely had time to mourn one death before another one came. In many ways, they had become desensitized to the deaths of their family and their neighbors.
Here, every loss was counted. Just a few days ago an older and frail being had passed away. There had been much ceremony in burying him, and they had all sat around for very long time in the center of their little town listening to those who had known him speak of him and his deeds.
That last part was what touched her heart the most. Here people were remembered not for what they had accrued or what they were born to but what they had done with their lives.
The building was right in front of her now. She put a hand up to the carved wooden door and pressed just slightly. It opened, and she entered. The building had a long central hallway that led both east and west. Small rooms had been placed along the hallways for patients. She could hear voices coming from the eastern side of the building, and she headed that way, the simple blue dress that she wore flapping around her knees as she went.
