His to Claim: A Sci-Fi Alien Romance - Taylor Vaughn Page 0,4

turned twenty-one. Oh moons…

Even as my parents fall all over me, hugging me and crying, I continue to wonder at this.

And fail to convince myself the answer to that question is anything but yes.

1

Kira

“Explain to me exactly why we’ve literally dug our own graves again?” my best friend asks, as we use two buckets to scoop water out of the shallow holes we made a week ago—holes not graves.

I refuse to call them graves even if they had been dug to measurements that would allow us to lay prone inside of them.

“It’s the only way to escape the Breeding Ceremony,” I insist. “Believe me this isn’t fun for me either, Zin.”

That was the understatement of the year—or as that jade Xalthurian had called it, the solar. I curse the last two days of rain storms that had made this action necessary. Yes, yes, our crops sorely needed the liquid blessing. In the first days of May, our people are already down to the very last of our rations and many of the elders who still pray to the old planet’s gods had been sending up supplications for rain.

But guess what? Bailing muddy water out of a hole big enough to fit a human is crazy hard work with only pigeon jerky in your stomach.

Funny but true, of all the animals they’d Noah’s Arked in the colony ship from Earth, pigeons were the only ones who’d somehow managed to thrive on this harsh red planet. So now when the crops ran low and there weren’t enough of the light purple egg-laying creatures we called Xalthurian chickens left to feed the town, pigeon jerky it was. Until the Xalthurians “blessed us” with a new shipment of food supplies when they arrived for the Breeding Ceremony.

“Sometimes I wonder if they purposefully let it get this bad before they come,” I say to Zin as I hand her up another bucket of water.

She takes it, and I have to give her credit as she limps away, singing an old planet love song. Doing all this work after a full day of farming and the numerous other things us New Terrhans have to do from sun up till sun down in order to scrape by on this barely fertile planet is harder for her than me.

Though Zinnia survived the crash that took out our colony ship when we were both in utero, her leg was badly crushed. At one point, there was talk of amputation after her post-crash delivery, but the surviving medical technician had been able to save it. However, Zinnia walks with a limp.

She’s covering up the pain well, singing back-to-back love songs, as we bale out our hiding holes. But I can see her limp becoming more and more pronounced.

I look up at the two moons, now high in the sky and call out to Zinnia, “Know what, we’ve done enough for today. We’ll get up before rise tomorrow and start again. Then maybe the sun will do the rest before the Xals get here.”

“Maybe…” Zinnia says. She reaches down a hand and braces her good leg against a nearby tree, as she helps me climb out. “I think this is good enough, though. It will be uncomfortable lying in water, but we got it low enough where we won’t drown if we have to hide out in these shallow graves for a while.”

“Holes,” I correct sternly.

Then, I affectionately hook my arm through hers. Partly to help her, since I know she’d never ask to lean on me while we walked the half mile back to the village. And partly, because I’m grateful to have company for all this hole digging and now baling out business. Even if that company thinks I’m crazy for even attempting to do what no twenty-one-year-old in our village has ever done before. Escape the Breeding Ceremony.

We’ve both been conditioned all of our lives to do this for the settlement’s sake, but Zinnia wasn’t there when my sister fell. Familiar grief seizes my throat as it always does whenever I think of Elle. It had taken many long months before I stopped crying for the loss of my sister and her baby boy. And when I finished crying, I found myself changed. No longer a little sister, but a woman, determined not to let those damn Xals touch me. Ever.

And yeah, Zinnia, thinks I’m crazy for trying to escape something we’ve both been groomed all of our lives to accept. But she didn’t see how that alien