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I can hear the plodding of her soft steps, but I can also hear something else. The scuttering of millions of feet coming closer. They will overtake her if I cannot get to her first. I pick up my pace and run for all that my brutal body is worth.
ChapterTwelve
Rhen
When he didn’t fuck me after the fire, I lay awake beside him in bed panicking while his huge shoulders rose and fell at ungodly long intervals that told me he was sleeping soundly. I replayed the events of the evening a hundred times, always arriving at the same conclusion:
This is it. He’s done with me.
Clearly, he didn’t like my dancing. Everyone else seemed to—it was kinda sweet, the visible softening of the females toward me and toward each other the longer I moved—but my big monster man didn’t once offer to join me. He didn’t like me braiding people’s hair. He watched with what Ithoughtlooked like interest, and it was clear his people liked it, judging by the line they formed, but maybe I should have offered to braid his hair first? Maybe he was doing the insecure man thing? Maybe I didn’t give him enough attention.
After the fire, he’d looked so angry with me back in the tent, and then he’d shoved me off when I presented myself for him. So, I lay there, after giving myself a day off from trying to escape, panic swimming through me like a school of piranhas, until I decided that I needed to move. At the same time, I also considered that…maybe I should think about staying when I eventually got back to the Sucere Chamber…
I remove the pretty clothing he gave me and put back on the tattered shreds of my Sucere uniform—happy to find my green beans still in my pocket and my name still stitched into the tag on the breast. I find rope sitting on top of the chest and quickly wrap it around myself—it’s basically the only thing holding my uniform up at all, but whatever. I’ve never been modest. Back in Portugal, there was a local fountain where most of the tiny town gathered after a rain to bathe together.
I think about Portugal now. How, even with my limited skills, I never felt like I didn’t have a place. But what am I here? If I can’t keep him happy for a week, I don’t want to know what happens to me when he tosses me out onto my ass, leaving me for males like Jiral…And I’m not sure how many jellybean teeth I can earn just through hair braiding.
I fight the urge to give the monster who’s got the best dick I’ve ever encountered a goodbye kiss, feeling more confident that I’ll actually get away this time with how hard he’s sleeping. And as I back away from him, I debate…wondering…if this is the last time I’ll see him.
Knowing I won’t get to make the choice of whether to return to the tribe or to stay in the Chamber if I say goodbye with a kiss and accidentally wake him, my shoulders slump in defeat. I bite my bottom lip and blow a kiss over my shoulder as I make my way out of the tent and into the dark night.
“Hey, Pam, you there?” I ask when I’m far enough away from the camp that the bonfire still raging bright looks like the light of a match at this distance.
“Rhen…I am…still here. And I regret to inform you that the humidity level of the Sucere Chamber is now below fifty percent.”
I wince. The Chamber was programmed to stay around sixty-five and, thanks to me and the portal door I left open, it’s dropped significantly.
“Without enough moisture in the Chamber atmosphere, and given that the horde ransacked the reservoirs, there may not be enough liquid to sustain the Sucere passenger population.”
“Yes, yes,” I say, flustered as the wind bites at me like puppy teeth through every exposed opening in my clothing. “You explained this before and the pressure isn’t helping.” I take off at a jog.
“While I regret to cause you…undue stress, I must inform you that I have already…begun protocol sixty-three…and if the humidity level drops below…forty percent…I will be left with no other choice than to seal Bay Twelve and terminate those passengers…”
“Bay Twelve?” I squeak.
“Yes…Rhen…”
“That was my bay.”
“Yes. Priority twelve of twelve, these passengers are most expendable, so will be jettisoned first.”
Jettisoned…expendable…insignificant…
I trip, flail and fall on my hands, grating them on the hard sand and reopening wounds from two days ago. I groan and sigh, roll onto my back and blink up at the sky.
Oh wow.
I hadn’t noticed the stars before and by golly, the sheer quantity of them is utterly discombobulating. I inhale deep, and then deeper still. I hold, thinking about how folks back home always used to talk about how small we humans were compared to the vastness of space. But that’s not true, is it?
Humans have incredible power. The power to change an entire planet, take it from what it was and then, through our own actions, consumption and growth, reduce it to this. And then to persevere and continue on, dance around fires, fight and resist in a land with no flowers.
We’re not insignificant. We’resignificantagainst space, against our planet, against the creatures that once inhabited it and the new terrors that inhabit it now.
The expression was written wrong. Because while we aren’t small, we still don’t matter against the thing that’s greater than infinite space. The only thing that is.
Time.
Against time, even planets are small.
