Even now, even after all this time, I could not go near a fully-grown male bracku without my heart seizing in my chest and my missing right hand throbbing as if it were still attached to me, mangled beyond recognition.
It made me worry that a human woman might not want me. Because I could not manage a herd as the others did.
But Tasha’s next words helped dispel at least a little of that fear.
“The saloon is so wonderful,” she said. “All this beautiful wood. I think it’s worth showing off in your pictures. We’ll take a few more in here, but we can also take some outside, if you’d like. And I’ll take Dorn’s and Xennet’s pictures outside as well.”
“What sort of publication will this be?” Dorn asked. “Where will the pictures all go when you are finished taking them?”
“Oh, that’s easy. We’re going to start with a calendar,” she said, a smile brightening her pretty face.
“A calendar?” I asked. Dorn and I glanced at each other, unsure if we’d understood correctly. “You mean, a document outlining future dates of the cycle?”
“Yes, precisely!” she confirmed. “Maybe it’s just a human custom,” she went on. “But we like to put pictures above the dates. There’s a very long human tradition of selling calendars with good-looking people and cute animals in them, often as fundraisers. Firefighters holding kittens. That sort of thing.”
I did not know what firefighters or kittens were. I decided not to ask. Tasha was the expert here. If I wanted any chance at all at earning a wife, I would throw myself at the mercy of her advice. Even if that advice seemed to involve fire for some reason. And kittens, whatever the blazes those were.
“Alright,” I said. “Let us continue.”
“Excellent,” Tasha replied. “Back to your places, everybody. Xennet, you can keep working on that mess behind the counter, as long as you’re out of sight. I don’t want your head randomly popping up in the background if we can help it.”
“Oh, he can help it,” Warden Hallum said, an edge of warning in his voice clearly meant for Xennet, who was now crouched behind the counter, scrubbing vigorously at the floor and muttering to himself among the rising clouds of flour.
“Good.” Tasha raised her data tab and aimed it at me once more. “Ready, Rivven?”
I cleared my throat and lifted my chin.
“Ready.”
2
SHILOH
Ihad just closed my locker door in the women’s changeroom of the shuttle engine factory when someone tapped my shoulder. I turned with my whole body to see who was behind me. It still hurt to move my head and neck too much.
“Hey, Shiloh,” Stasia said.
Like me, she was wearing her factory uniform. The fabric was stiff and stained, the shade of it somewhere between a murky blue and dusty grey. I still remembered my first shift here, when I’d been handed my uniform. It was the first time in my life I’d found a colour so depressingly ugly that I hadn’t bothered trying to figure out how to recreate it with paints inside my head.
“Rod’s looking for you.”
Uh oh.
Rodney was our zone’s foreman. I couldn’t imagine he wanted to see me for anything good. I often found him staring at me during shifts, as if waiting for me to slip up somehow. But he’d never called me in for a special meeting before.
“You alright?” Stasia’s eyes were a clear, kind hazel. Burnt umber at the edges of the iris, melting into something warmer at the centre – raw sienna – layered with flecks of cadmium greenaround the pupils, as distinct and bright as shards of metal. “You were away for three days.”
“I was unwell.”
Unwell. That was one way of describing the hellish migraine that had put me through the ringer for the past 72 hours. But I didn’t have the energy to go into detail about it. I was exhausted. My nerves felt like they’d been dragged across a cheese grater for three days straight, and as a result my entire body was tender and raw.
Not a good sign considering my twelve-hour shift hadn’t even started yet. Technically thirteen hours, today. Both Stasia and I had shown up early for some parts maintenance overtime. The changeroom was mostly empty at this hour, the regular line-start folks not having arrived yet.
“Want me to walk with you?”
“No, no. You go clock in and get started. Get those hours, girl,” I told her with a weak smile. I didn’t want her to waste any of her precious paid overtime on me. “I’ll see you on the floor.”
She hesitated for a few seconds, pursing her lips, but then she turned and left when the need for every minute of paid overtime won out. And so it should have. Nobody showing up before regular line-start did it out of the goodness of their heart. We were all trying to eke out an existence on dreary Terratribe I, humanity’s oldest industrial colony planet. We all needed the credits.
