The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,80

okay.” I hoped that was true. “Are you okay?”

She looked down. “I’m too young for breeding. That’s their rule. They want you for that.”

I didn’t know if I should feel terrified for me or relieved for her. Somehow, I was absolutely both.

“I’m sorry, they got you,” she added. “I hate them. This planet. They’re all savages. And I want all of them to die.”

I squeezed her hand. “Not everyone here is that way. There are others here who aren’t like that. But yes, I agree. The Reamers are awful. We need to get out of here. Before you get older and they realize I’m awake. Hopefully, the latter and not the former.”

“Is that your power? Teleporting or whatever?”

I frowned. “Um, no. I don’t know what they told you about me, but I don’t have any powers. When we were on the spaceship, I was headed to stay with my brother and to have an operation because I’m sick. So I guess you could say I have the opposite of superpowers.”

One side of her mouth pinched up, like she didn’t believe me. I knew there were stories about my family floating around the galaxy, but they were all part of the branding my brother had devised for us after our parents died. He and his marketing team had made them into legends, which incidentally, made him into a scion of legends, and that was super helpful for his electability.

It didn’t help me now, though. All those fairy tales about my family were only making it harder for me to get Rae moving right now.

I put my feet on the floor and tried to stand. Didn’t fall over. That was progress!

“Do you know what they did with my clothes?” I asked.

Rae picked at a thread on her blouse, which looked like it started out expensive, before the crash and the fire and all. All ancients and holies, this child must be traumatized.

But not as much as we both would be if the Reamers got to us before we could make our escape.

“They cleaned you up,” she said. “They said people from the sky came a long time ago and brought diseases, which is why the Reamers are so ugly and mean now. They had to detox us, and I have to wash in the smelly green water every day. It’s gross.”

I shuddered. I didn’t want to think about them “detoxing” me when I was unconscious. More than that, I didn’t want to think of how long I’d been out. How much time did I have before they came for me? Or rather, for us. I wasn’t leaving here without Rae.

Or my husbands.

Chapter Twenty-One

“So no idea where my clothes are?” I prodded. This blanket-like wrapping was not going to stay on if I moved around much, so I needed my own things.

“No, I have an idea. Come on.” Rae turned, flicked a lever set into the smooth wall, and slipped through a door I hadn’t noticed before.

The Reamer camp was nothing like my City-State. A long, straight hallway was dotted with doors at regular intervals, each with a lever latch like the one Rae had just used to open our room. The colors were uniformly gray and white, and it looked like someone cleaned regularly, maybe even compulsively. About fifty meters down, the hallway turned at a right angle.

I’d seen hallways like this one before, even with the same levers. In fact, they were so familiar that I followed Rae for several steps before it hit me—this hallway should not exist on this planet. It was a standard prefab used by almost all colony outposts. The lever latches operated a system inside the walls that could compensate for pressure and atmosphere changes if one of the rooms was breached in a hostile environment.

The Reamers had either once been colonists…or had slaughtered the colonists. Was it horrible that I didn’t even care which messed-up past spawned them? I just wanted to go home, and for all its familiar-looking structure and technology, this was not my home. My home no longer looked anything like this.

“In here,” she said, pulling a lever in the wall and opening a door.

I started forward and abruptly jumped back. In the room were three Reamers.

She paled and then turned slightly to me. “I’m sorry. They told me if I brought you to them without making a fuss I could eat tonight.”

I wanted to be angry, but getting fed was the most primal instinct we had. She had to eat. I