swallowed. Would I do the same? I had no idea, and I hoped not to find out. “That’s okay. I’m glad you can eat tonight.”
She peered at me intently. “You’re nicer that I thought you would be. My parents used to call your brother a living nightmare.” Then she took off running.
I almost laughed. I mean, that was unexpected enough to be ridiculously funny. Yep, Brent was a nightmare. But I’d give anything to see him right now. Or my husbands.
Anyone but the three Reamers in front of me.
“Female.” The tallest one sniffed the air. “You smell fertile. I will put my seed in your belly.”
I shuddered. Even though I knew it couldn’t happen—and honestly, this might have been the first time I had ever been thankful for my weird physiology—the threat was revolting. He wasn’t just threatening my current safety; he was threatening my future, not to mention a theoretical child’s. What an asshole.
“I’d be worth a lot to you in trade.” I spoke the words as they occurred to me, proud of my ability to think on my feet like this. “More than I would be worth as some kind of breeder. My family has problems. Sometimes we have three legs.” I was lying, of course, but they’d never know that.
Two of them, the shorter ones, stared at each other. Yep, I was going down this path. “I’m worth much more to you if you trade me than if you try to have a baby with me. My uncle has three legs, and they say it skips a generation.” I held up that many fingers. “Surely the City-State has something you’d want more than a defective breeder.”
The tall one scoffed. “We no trade.”
I nodded fast. “Okay. First time for anything. I could teach you.”
“Female no teach.”
I was quickly gathering how this was going to go. Fear was a real thing, and my body never did behave the way I wanted it to. I could feel panic tears behind my eyes, but I was damned if these Reamer monsters would see me cry. They were the kinds of brutes who would equate fear with weakness, and then they’d probably assume they’d won. So instead of just wiping my eyes, like I would if I were crying, I wiped my whole face, as if I could rub the truth of my situation away. My heavy sigh was deliberately annoyed.
I wasn’t entirely sure the Reamers were buying my show of bravado, until that sigh ended on a cough. Too much dust inhaled on the trip over, probably, or allergies to a brand-new world and its spores…but clearly, the Reamers weren’t thinking along either of those lines.
When I coughed, all three of them flinched away from me. People from the sky came a long time ago and brought diseases, Rae had said.
The line between looking fearful-slash-weak and looking virulently ill was thin. Kind of like my chances of getting out of this without being raped. But hey. Whatever worked, right?
Plus, I had tons of experience looking sick.
I coughed again, covering my mouth with my hand, and when I pulled it away, I made a show of wiping my hand on the blanket wrapped around my body. Touch it now, assholes.
“You heard the child,” I told them. “My brother is a living nightmare. Do you know what that word means? Nightmare?”
The taller one, the one who’d been speaking most, looked confused.
“It means like ghouls, like he is something that you see in your sleep, and it wakes you up screaming.” I put one hand against the doorjamb and sagged, like I was losing strength. “How about this word, then—sick. Do you know sick?”
The big Reamer didn’t move, but the other two shuffled a few steps away. They looked at each other. One half-shrugged. Neither looked directly at me.
“Look, here’s the deal,” I went on, pulling all kinds of fiction out of my brain and just hoping that my pale face and practiced sick posture was selling this malarkey. “My brother is a galactic senator, right? He sent me here to infect the people on this planet with the virus we both suffer from. When they get sick, the Union forces will land their starships here and wipe out everybody. It’ll be easy. So I’m not a breeder. I’m a weapon. Check your spies and that kid if you don’t believe me. The leader of that other group has had me watched constantly because he suspects I’m dangerous. He just hasn’t figured out yet