The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,16

was easier to simply travel in my mind, even when there weren’t vids to watch.

“What was your life? In the stars?” Mattis caught my attention, and I forced my eyes to focus on his handsome face.

“Lonely.” I would never have given that answer to someone back home, but I might as well be honest here. Really, what did I have to lose?

He nodded. “It is easy to be lonely, even in a crowd.”

Finished with the brand, he set it aside. I stared down at the wound again. Funny, it looked remarkably like a prison brand. I’d seen them on the men who my brother helped rehabilitate by coming back to the fold after they served their time. By that, he meant they got to work in jobs serving others the rest of their lives while everyone judged them.

I was getting downright controversial in my thinking.

“Thank you.”

Mattis nodded. “I am to help take care of you. That is what Torrin said. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that. I never thought to have a woman who would need my help.”

“Why not? You own your own business. You have a close relationship with Torrin. Or maybe everyone does?” He shook his head, meaning I was right, not everyone did. “I’d think you were a catch.”

Mattis linked his hands together. “I am fortunate, but my father and mother were not highly thought of. They gave in to the madness. Tried to kill others. In the end, they had to be killed. I am not sought after for family life.” His smile was fast. “The madness tends to breed out.”

“But that’s terrible. Partnerships, marriages, are about more than creating offspring, they’re also…” His expression was so shocked, I had to trail off. Back up. Rethink. This world and its customs were turning everything I understood upside down. “So wait, if you claimed a woman or became one of her, um, husbands, you would be required to produce children with her?”

“Where you are from, males and females don’t do this? They don’t have sex?” That was real horror in his voice.

It was everything I could manage not to burst out laughing. “No, we do. Or rather, married people do. And yes, sometimes they have kids, when the timing is right. But if both partners aren’t ready or they have genetic concerns, they can delay conception or alter the fetal DNA or… You don’t do any of that.”

It wasn’t really a question, but Mattis shook his head anyway. No reliable contraception here and no genetic engineering. Well then. Nothing like a lack of technology to throw all my natural defects into stark relief.

“It’s better for people like me, with madness in our line, to avoid having children,” he said.

“Probably same for me,” I said without thinking.

“Why? You said your parents died. Were they also put down for the safety of your clan?”

I wished I could go back and tell five-moments-ago me to keep her mouth shut. This wasn’t the kind of place where I could feel safe talking about my medical fragility. If Torrin thought I wasn’t good for claiming or breeding or whatever, I could find myself down the street and working on my back for a living.

Carefully, I avoided his question. “My mother and father died when rebels blew up their starship, their, err, sky transport. To my knowledge, there wasn’t anything wrong with my parents’ minds.”

Except, maybe, that they’d supported and possibly engineered the subjugation of those rebels’ world. I hadn’t been raised to believe conquering and converting planets and bringing their ignorant populations into civilization and Union was madness, but some people out there certainly considered it as such. The rebels who killed my parents almost certainly did.

“Are you tired?” Mattis asked, out of nowhere.

“What?”

“You yawned.”

I did? “I guess I probably am. And if I’m not, I should be. I’ve been running on adrenaline since I woke up from the crash. How long ago was that? Ack, time is a thing here, right?”

Mattis raised an eyebrow to indicate that I was acting a little strange, and then I raised one right back, and suddenly we were laughing together, for no reason at all. It felt a little like I was losing my mind, but this particular descent into madness felt…nice? Yeah. I wasn’t getting home soon, that much was becoming obvious, but also, there were kind people here who had sworn to help me and take care of me, and that was something. Maybe I could rest and reset