The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,15
time reading and learning, of course. Also, when my wardens and doctors and teachers weren’t around to see, I watched sensory vids. Tons of them, on every topic imaginable. I knew I’d never climb a mountain or pilot a star fighter through planetary ice rings, but I ached to know what those things were like, what they felt like, and sensory vids eased that yearning a little.
When I was fifteen and in an especially rebellious phase, I watched a whole lifetime of itinerant pan-galactic artists, true heathens and hedonists, musicians and dancers and resistors of everything the Union stood for, and all-ancients, how I wanted to be one of them.
Even when they marked their bodies. The pain and patience they endured to get those tattoos and piercings and brandings wasn’t a small thing. It was real pain, a thing I understood very well. But when I endured a surgical procedure or a chemical treatment, often the only result was that I didn’t get sicker or weaker.
When those pan-galactic heathens went in for body alteration, the result was often pretty, always liberating. Always courageous.
Only later did I hear that those troupe members had been “reclaimed” by the enforcers and made to see the error of their ways. All of the beauty on their bodies had been scoured off, repaired by forced procedures.
But in the dingy room behind Mattis’ bar, squeezing a wad of soft cloth in my fist while he burned the shapes into my skin, I remembered the beauty of those black-market sensory vids. And I remembered also how much I had wanted to live them.
At last, he leaned back and hung the brand on a rack to cool. He dipped a length of soft green cloth into a bowl and then held it against the raw welt on my arm.
“I’m sorry, Bianca,” he said for maybe the hundredth time.
“Please don’t be. The heat burned past the nerve endings almost right away, and there weren’t a whole lot there to begin with. Not like my hands earlier.” I paused and asked, “Can I see?”
He moved the cloth away, and I peered down. The mutilation was too red and angry to be discernible yet, but I could see where it had taken skill. The figure for their City-State was a stylized pack of beasts in profile.
“What does it mean? The figure?”
Mattis looked ready to put the wet cloth back over my arm, but I waved him off. I couldn’t stop staring at it.
“It’s the pack, the brotherhood. See how we’re in a circle and connected? It means we’re unbreakable as long as we are together.”
“But they’re facing the wrong way,” I said. “Shouldn’t they be facing out, back to back?”
“No. When it heals, you’ll see the shape of the void in the center. You can sort of make it out, see how it’s like a flower? Like the white blooms on the calathari plants. That’s what they are all focused on, the thing they protect. There’s only one good, fertile piece of land on this rock, and clans fight for the right to care for it for a season.”
“You fight over a piece of ground? When you could be protecting your women instead?”
His smile was fast. “That is how we protect our women. We can’t feed them if we can’t grow anything. A good portion of our clan that are currently acting as military are actually farmers. When we beat the others in the battle, they drop their weapons and care for the land for the season. Then the winter comes, we step away and do it again next year.”
This was the strangest concept I’d ever heard. Mattis readied another brand. This one would have a bunch of numbers on it; the last one would represent Torrin. They couldn’t read, but numbers they understood perfectly.
“I’m sorry to do this again.”
I waved my other hand. “You guys do this as children?”
He held out his own arm. “Everyone gets the City-State markings. Then the boys get their numbers right away. The women get theirs when they marry to match their husband’s or plural husbands. Sometimes, a woman has more than one. That usually has to do with an alliance of families. Like Astor and Torrin have the same father, but they have a different one from Dreama. Together, they were quite a force to be reckoned with.”
He pressed the marking down on me, and my mind drifted away. Pain did this to me. I’d had so many years being poked and prodded. It