looked at me as his Diplomat promised he’d come back. For me. The memory of his red and black diamond gaze sends a shiver up my spine.
Maybe I am crazy, though. The alien who vowed to return for me didn’t even show up last year. And believe me, I had looked. Squinting so hard at all the Reapers, I’d actually recognized one of them. The gigantic golden Xal who’d rushed to Tel D’Rek’s defense, was rounding up babies with the rest of the reaping force and had even poked his head through our front door. But nope … there were no arrogant big blue aliens dressed in gold as far as I could tell.
So yes, there was a hopefully good chance that Tel D’Rek had forgotten about me. But…
“I can’t risk having a boy baby taken away from me. I think I’d go crazy,” I quietly admit to Zinnia as we come out of the red tree woods, my voice losing the defiance it usually takes on when I talk about escaping the Breeding Ceremony.
“I think you’d go crazy, too,” Zinnia answers, her voice just as soft. “But I heard they do things to the girls who try to run. Bad things. Things they don’t necessarily recover from. Jin-Hu told me sometimes they breed the girls who run, then kill them after. Maybe that’s just another one of the stories they tell us under twenty-one girls to make sure we don’t do anything stupid when the time comes, but …”
“No,” I answer, my voice an angry, flat monotone. “The Xals would have let us starve if the founding leaders hadn’t agreed to let their males breed us. I wouldn’t put anything past them.”
“Me either,” Zinnia says as we walked by the Xalthurian chicken house, which is currently so low on birds that each family could only expect one egg per non-senior-aged person once a week.
Despite our expanding numbers, they gave us the same amount of chickens this year as the year my sister died. I made it a point to count, and I planned to count again this year, even though I know it won’t do us any good.
It’s not exactly like the Xalthurians have a customer service department. Someone we can complain to about getting short-changed while they run through our little settlement like hunters on the prowl for twenty-one-year old women and their baby boy progeny.
Zinnia slows a little as we approach her house. Probably because she knows her brother will be drunk on the alcohol he’s somehow manages to keep fermenting, no matter how low the corn rations got from this year to the last. One of the many benefits of inheriting their father’s seat on the settlement’s board of leaders, I guess.
Zinnia stops just a few feet from the house she’s been forced to share with her brother and sister-in-law, ever since her parents died in the Great Storm. She glances at the large red clay house, then back at me. “Dan says the Breeding Ceremony is the only way I’ll ever be able to get a baby.”
Wow ….
I turn her around to face me, so that she can see just how serious my face is in the double moonlight as I say, “Dan is a piece of pigeon shit who puts you down because he doesn’t have an ounce of any kind of talent or skill that he can take pride in. Don’t ever let him get inside your head.”
I’m aware that my friend is extremely self-conscious about her injuries but in my opinion, they don’t detract from Zinnia’s natural beauty. She has the most beautiful skin, like shimmering onyx, and kind brown eyes that light up whenever she lets her huge smile come out to shine. She’s also an amazing singer and reads so many books, they’re already talking about giving her a settlement teacher position to keep up with the rising hybrid and human birth rates.
Besides all of that, Zin has one of the best hearts of anyone I know. I mean, here she is risking everything to help me get out of a Breeding Ceremony that we’ve both been raised to think it’s our duty to withstand. For the good of the village and our people.
But, funny how not one of the older human leaders who’d arranged that agreement with our alien overlords would ever have to board the Xalthurians' ship to get bred by a gang of loin clothed Xals or have their babies taken away afterwards.
They pull you into this