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I pull her feet into my lap when I sit down at the other end of the couch. Tabitha doesn’t protest, so I pull one boot off, and then the other, and then rub her feet. She’s wearing strange fabric tubes on her feet, but I’ve learned that humans like to cover their bodies with all kinds of layers for some reason, so I just roll with it. “So…you’re getting cattle?”
“Ten,” she agrees.
That makes me pause. “Ten? Can you even make a profit off of ten?”
Tabitha shrugs, rubbing a hand over her face. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to do too many at once. Even ten is terrifying to me.”
“Because of water?” I ask, guessing. I know how precious it is to her.
She licks her lips, swallowing hard, and I can tell she wants a drink. Whenever she gets agitated, she likes to sip water, so I put her feet down and get one of the glasses from the kitchen. As I return, I notice she has a startled look on her face that turns to one of pleasure. “Oh…thank you.”
I want to tell her that she doesn’t have to thank me. That I’ll always take care of her. That she can count on me…but she’s already skittish. I just give her my best casual smile, returning to my spot on the sofa and ignoring the surge of pleasure in my chest when she immediately puts her feet back into my lap.
Tabitha is quiet as she sips her water, holding the glass carefully in her hands. I rub her feet, paying attention to her body language. She’s not stiff, but she is quiet, and I know she’s thinking about her past. “Before I was brought to Risda, my last owner was an ooli trader. His whole thing was that he bought lots of animals cheap and sold them individually to make a profit. The animals didn’t matter—slaves or meat-stock, birds or whatever. We were all the same to him.”
I say nothing, letting her continue. Tabitha speaking of her past is a rarity, and I don’t want to interrupt.
“The trader would make his money off of two or three in the large lot he purchased, and if the others didn’t sell right away, he sent them to his overflow farm. He’d pull stock from there every now and then when he ran low, but for the most part, if you went to the overflow farm, you went there for good. And it was on a wasteland base. The land was cheap, I guess, and we had to live in barns with the wild animals, and we ate the same things they did and slept in the same hay. We drank from the same troughs. And when it didn’t rain—and it didn’t rain often, because it was a wasteland—the water was rationed. One year, the drought was so bad that the wells dried up and all the cattle on base died, and so did half the slaves. I lived by drinking puddles and licking condensation off of the moisture generators and ignoring how disgusting and scummy the water was. It was awful. Some days I was so thirsty that I wanted to die. Just when I thought I’d hit the end, Lord va’Rin showed up and bought all of the slaves that were left, but there weren’t many of us.” She pauses and takes another sip of water. “And that’s how I got here.”
I can’t imagine the misery it was. Of being treated like an animal, and slowly dying of thirst because no one will bother to give you the necessities. Hrrrusek and I grew up poor, but we managed. This is an entirely different sort of misery. “I understand.”
“I haven’t ever attempted raising livestock because I’m afraid of failing them,” Tabitha says in a soft voice. “What if my well goes dry?”
I rub her feet, trying to soothe her anxiety. “Then you complain to the Port custodians and they will fix it for you. Or you program your bots to find the nearest water source and make sure your animals are taken care of.”
“Bots break easily. And it’s not just water. What if the animals get sick, or injured?”
“Then you call your favorite praxiian and he’ll help you.”
Her gaze turns to me, her dark eyes soft. “You would, wouldn’t you.”
It’s not a question, more of a statement, as if she’s just now realizing she doesn’t have to be alone anymore. I nod, the lump of emotion in my throat entirely her doing.
“Can I kiss you again?” she asks.
“Always.”
She swings her legs down from my lap and crawls toward me across the sofa. I remain very still, not entirely sure what she’s doing. When she straddles me, I realize she’s intent upon a very different sort of kiss. “Can I kiss you like this?”
