it any other way.” Because my father had forbidden me from doing so.
“Wolves are monogamous.” Mrs. Ouro helped decide our curriculum, so she had to know about the concept of true love, otherwise she’d have given us the wrong books to read. I wasn’t surprised she’d landed on at least the edge of the truth.
“They are, but I find I don’t mind being claimed by one.” I sighed. “Daddy doesn’t want me talking much about myself, and I don’t want to upset him, so please help with that by not asking questions. I’d love to hear what’s been going on here since I left.”
“He doesn’t want you talking about life outside the ambush because he’s afraid more of us might try to escape.” This from another of my cousins, and she wasn’t finished. “Things are so much harder for us now. He even implanted devices under our skin in the backs of our necks, so we can be tracked if we ever try to leave!”
I froze. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I’d never thought my father would go to those extremes, but I suppose I should have. Finally, I managed to ask, “Does His Majesty know?”
“I assume you’ll tell him if he doesn’t?” Mrs. Ouro said, her voice so quiet, I barely heard her.
I gave her a tiny nod and looked back to my cousin. “I’m not sorry I left, but I’m sorry it’s made things harder for you. The truth is, most of you would be miserable in the outside world. The first month or two was so hard, while I learned the ways of outside society. Even now, it’s hard, but I’ve always been the one who didn’t really fit in here, so for me, it’s been worth it. I’m not certain it would be for most of you.”
Because life in here is so fucking different than life outside, and that was my father’s fault, but it couldn’t be changed for those who’d grown up in this life.
“Are all the men so big?” another cousin asked.
I smiled. “No. Most men are about the size of most of our men. Perhaps a little smaller on average, but about the same. Squatch is huge.”
“His hand is bigger than your face!” This from one of the juveniles, and I smiled down at her. “You’ll be in trouble when they realize you’ve snuck away from the kids’ activities.”
The children spend the evening and night in one of our large gathering rooms, where they’ll all sleep on little foldable cots while their parents are enjoying the festivities. You have to be fourteen to be allowed to join the adults until midnight, and eighteen before you can stay up until dawn.
Unless you become a mom, at which point, you’re considered eighteen, even if you’re only twelve. All education stops once you’re pregnant. Every twelve-year-old in the ambush hopes they’ll be given to someone early so they can be an adult, but few are in our generation. It had been the norm for our grandparents, but I figured the men who’d been sent out to get law degrees had likely advised the ambush leaders to raise the age at which they gave their girls to be impregnated. They got around the rules by traveling to states where the legal age is low, and where the age difference is taken into consideration. In Utah, the age of consent is eighteen, but so long as the age difference is ten years or less and it’s all consensual, Utah doesn’t usually care, though it’s safest if the girl is sixteen. It’s easier to make the girl younger in North Carolina, where a fourteen-year-old and seventeen-year-old are legal so long as the DA doesn’t want to push it, and our people know which counties are safe.
Also, if a young teen and older adult marry, then it’s legal. When I was ten, a fourteen-year-old friend had been forced into marriage with a forty-one-year-old man from another ambush. Their triplets were born without any birth defects, so the science worked. Two of the children had been returned to our ambush, and one child was kept by the parents. My friend had more healthy kids after, and had been allowed to keep more of them, but a portion always came back to the home ambush, usually raised by the grandparents, but sometimes an aunt or uncle.
I managed to get the women talking about who’d had babies, and how the babies were doing. The conversation should have been a happy one, but