I thumbed the screen awake.
It wasn’t an order.
The Agency seal glowed on the display. Interlocked rings. Too clean. Too official.
Under it, the message waited.
Greetings. You have been selected.
I stared at it.
More words appeared beneath the first line.
The Alien Matchmaking Agency is pleased to invite you to choose a bride. Your appointment is confirmed for this Friday at 13:00, Matchmaking Office, New Knossos. We look forward to building your family.
For a moment, I didn’t move.
Then I read it again.
Then a third time.
It didn’t change.
My name was there. My citizen file. A cheerful little countdown blinked in the corner, like I’d asked for it. Like I’d walked into that office and signed my name to a list.
I hadn’t.
I’d never gone near that place. I’d never asked for a human woman to be brought across space and handed to me like a shipment I’d forgotten ordering.
A bride.
The word sat there, ridiculous and impossible.
I didn’t want a bride.
Which meant someone else had decided I did.
There weren’t many people stupid enough to do that. Fewer who had access to my registration. Kazan was soft enough now to think it was helping. Remmen was smug enough to make it official.
The settlement was for desperate women. We were men with dying bloodlines and empty houses. Men who wanted families badly enough to trust an Agency seal and a woman from Earth.
That wasn’t me.
I had a forge and forty workers who needed tools, timber, and someone to keep the accounts honest. I had a roof that didn’t leak and a bed no one else slept in.
What would I do with a wife?
What would she do here?
Freeze. Cry. Get bored. Get hurt. Decide she’d made a mistake.
Or worse, decide she hadn’t.
I didn’t need complications or paperwork. I didn’t need a funeral waiting for me in a pretty dress.
I wasn’t desperate.
I jabbed the screen with one soot-blackened finger and swiped the message away.
