Page 14 of Seven Oars
Daphne stopped crying.“Like worms?”
Alyesha let her arms drop, and they floated midair.“It’s going to be a long five weeks.”
*****
Everything, on every level and down to the smallest detail, was new and different. The packaged food. The microgravity. The alien pilots. The very fact of flying through space.
At times, Rosamma wondered if she’d dreamed this whole thing.
She liked to press her face to one of the small portholes and look out. No more Meeus in sight, but the stars blinked with cold, unwelcoming light against the blackness.
She imagined how silent it must be out there. Sound couldn’t travel through a vacuum. Neither could a living being survive out there. Still, she wished she could step outside and float among the stars. Even for a minute.
I am in a spaceship, flying through space.
Despite worries about her health and Ren’s, despite the uncertainty of her future and the presence of strict, unfriendly Rix, she found it… marvelous.
Her eyes drifted from the porthole and settled on Phex’s alien form that fascinated her even more than open space.
He was resting.
“Sleep” didn't quite capture what the Rix did to regenerate. It was more like a complete shutdown, a suspension of not just consciousness, but basic bodily functions like breathing. They looked dead when they did it, and it freaked the women out to no end.
For Rosamma, Phex’s stasis periods were the best moments. She could look her fill without worrying he might catch her looking.
With his brilliant eyes closed, his face wasn’t forbidding, just strange and beautiful, otherworldly and mysterious, like stars and planets scattered against the black swath beyond the porthole.
She tried to imagine what it would feel like to have him look back at her—and immediately dismissed any such thoughts. If he ever did, she would see disgust in his eyes. Or worse, pity. It would break the fragile illusion that had somehow taken root in her mind.
And that was all she had, her illusion. Once they reached Priss, Phex would leave, and she would never see him again.
“Who’s next for the bathroom?” Fawn’s shrill voice pulled Rosamma out of her daydream.
At the deck, Aris winced and muttered something.
Aris never interacted with the women. Their mannerisms, what they ate, their language and laughter—he despised all of it. Such a stuck-up man. Striving zealously to imitate his Lieutenant, he ended up being more strict, more abrupt, and more unbending than Phex, as if that were even possible.
“It’s me. I’m next.”
Rosamma floated through the open hatch and squeezed into the narrow bathroom stall. Using sanitary napkins, she cleaned herself and rubbed dry shampoo into her long hair.
She’d thought about cutting it short for convenience. Her hair was not as thick and lustrous as Alyesha’s dark mane or as wild as Fawn’s wheat-colored curls, but her long braid was the color of moonlight, so pale a blond it shimmered in the sun.
It was unusual, like many of her features, but in a good way. She clung to her braid as a symbol of conventional womanhood.
When Rosamma emerged, Fawn and Mara had already prepared their food packs. Their entire dinner affair was strange and floating, but they found comfort in recreating familiar rituals.
“Close the hatch,” Alyesha instructed Rosamma after she helped fetch water pouches.
Rosamma complied.
The women’s food intake perplexed the Rix. The quantities they consumed were astonishingly large by the aliens’standards. The rationed amounts of freeze-dried poultry livers and tubes of tomato soup, barely enough to fill up the smallest of the women, elicited a stupefied reaction from their alien carers. They didn’t laugh and point fingers, but it sure felt like they wanted to.
In reality, the massive Rix males required only a fraction of what a human would need to survive.
Another glaring distinction between their bodily functions was the fact that Rix didn’t drink. Whether that trait made them superior was debatable, but since Rix consumed their liquids through food, their bodies processed it differently. So, the physicality of the women needing to use the bathroom had the aliens’heads spinning. Because they themselves didn’t pee.
Rosamma had known that, from sharing her house with Lyle and his human mate, Cricket. So she wasn’t quite as unsettled by the fact. Still, she felt the Rix’s veiled disgust as keenly as the others.
