The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,43

sure had only deepened my blush.

The place where Dreama brought me smelled different, like water. Clean, organic, cool, and about as unlike the surface of this planet as it was possible to get. We passed under a wide, curved doorway into a cavern that was easily as big as a starship. The ceiling and floor reached for each other in a series of spikes, and lanterns glittered off of slick rock surfaces and languid, still pools. A group of women sat on cushions near one of the pools, and a basket had been unburdened of its contents between them. They looked up when we arrived, but seeing Dreama, they made space for us.

“This is Bianca,” Dreama introduced me, and most of the women nodded like they already knew who I was. “She just took four brands—including both of my brothers—and has no idea what’s coming. Figured you all could give her some idea what to expect.”

I blanched. “What?”

Were things…different here?

The woman all the way to the left, with brown hair and sharp green eyes, leaned forward. “Did you really fall from the sky?”

“I did.” I sat in an empty space among them. If I was going to be here, I should be comfortable. “My ship crashed.”

She nodded. “My bonded says that there are all kinds of new weapons, too. But it makes me a little nutty to think that there are ships flying around up there over our heads that we can’t see.”

“Okay,” Dreama interrupted, and they all shifted. They definitely deferred to her. “I didn’t bring her here to talk about the ship. That’s not something we can control. What we do about that is up to Torrin.” She passed me a loaf of bread and some kind of meat. I still wasn’t sure what I was eating half the time. It all tasted good, and so far, it hadn’t made me sick. I was just grateful that everyone was feeding me, since so far, I had provided nothing to the City-State. Well, maybe my reading skills had saved Nox, but other than that, not much.

“What are joinings like where you are from?” This question came from a blonde in the corner. She sewed while she asked me. “That might help us know how to tell you what to expect.”

“I’ve never been married, ah bonded, or whatever you want to call it.” I sighed. “My brother isn’t wed either, and not many of the people I worked with were married. It’s one of those situations where most people marry for politics or for money. Clout. All kinds of reasons. With the breeding restrictions, there’s little point in doing that if you’re not going to get to have children anyway. My parents seemed happy enough, although they spent almost no time together when they weren’t having to be political. She lived her life, he lived his.”

They all stared at me. Did they suddenly think I had two heads? I rubbed the back of my neck. Yes, I was feeling a little bit alien at that moment. We were all human, but I was not like them. The blonde rose from the floor and walked over to hug me. I startled. What was she doing? Oh, we were touching. Yes, I’d gotten used to the men doing it, but now it looked like the women did, too.

“Sounds lonely. I can promise you that you’ll never be alone like that here. If you’re not with them—and in plural bonding, you’re with them a lot—you’ll be with us. Probably exactly us. We do tend to be sort of…caste like here. The prostitutes stay together, the wives together, the single women together. Except for Dreama. She’s with everyone.”

Dreama shook her head. “Bianca will be with everyone, too. This is Torrin’s bonded. The wife of the leader takes care of everyone.”

I’d never had friends outside of my work when I’d been teaching. But we’d mostly talked about work. As I digested all the information I’d been given, the blonde woman walked away. I needed names to call them since they all knew me.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what to call all of you.”

The green-eyed woman smiled, and it was so friendly and open and easy, I was taken aback. My first instinctive thought was, what’s her angle? But that wasn’t fair. These people had been nothing but kind to me.

“I’m Farrin, Gaetens bonded, and she,” she gestured to the blonde, who had stopped near a larger basket crammed with textiles, “is Birdie, bonded to Ivors