Rylie watched her daduck through the watership and out onto the deck.
She remained behind and programmed the cleaner bots to sanitize the ship. Her bare feet twitched and she rocked back and forth on her soles as she followed the bots’ movements with her eyes, delaying the inevitable and gathering the courage she needed to leave the quiet shell of the ship.
Who did he invite?It gnawed at her thoughts.Not Charlene...so not one of the local farmers. Maybe the manufacturers from the port?No, Rylie decided, a manufacturer wouldn’t suggest secrecy.
The law enforcement?She mulled it over.
What if he’s trying to find me a seed donor?Her eyes widened in horror. It wouldn’t be the first time he had tried to pair her with a local soldier or official, or one of her educational teachers. Da was fixated on growing a large family to rule Kepler like a Rockefeller. Rylie dug her nails into her palm.
She didn’t have an aversion to men. She just didn’t see their usefulness when her world revolved around the farm. What could a partner give her that a hired worker couldn’t?
She stepped from the watership and its glass gate closed behind her.
Janet can have them.And her sister had known all the men, and then some. Rylie found no appeal in a partner who had lain with her sister. She traversed the steps, stopping briefly to hose the sand off her feet.
She was at the top of the bluff before she knew it, and her nose filled with the escaped aroma of one of her ma’s elaborate dinners.
That’s when she saw the giant spaceship beyond her house.
Rylie took a step back before she caught herself.Oh no...
She gaped.It’s worse. So much worse. She would take a seed donor over what rose up before her.The government.
Rylie side-stepped her house until the ship that sat in the landing yard was unobstructed. All she could make out was power, overwhelming power, and it was almost too much for her. It screamed of affairs that she didn’t know. It was a stark contrast to her quiet life on a planet that she already thought had too many humans.
She licked her chapped lips and weighed the Earthian ship against what she expected inside her dining room: stodgy men and women, decked in uniforms, who had no right being in the wilds of Kepler. Rylie glanced at the large windows of her house and the glint of fractured light from within.
There was movement inside, shadows that crossed the depths of the house, but the people were obscured from the angle at which she stood.
“Rylie!” Janet’s voice screeched out of nowhere. “We’re waiting for you!”
Rylie sighed and made her way through the yard and into the shadow of her home until she stood before her sister.
Janet let her through with a smirk.
“Why are there officials here?” Rylie asked as she passed her by and entered the washroom. Her eyes landed on Da’s discarded clothes in the corner. “Please tell me it has nothing to do with me.”
“I don’t know. Ma won’t say a thing but she’s acting way too sweet to be deceitful.” Janet’s small smile faded and her voice lowered. “The men who are here... They’re, well, they’re from the EPED.”
Rylie stopped undressing. Her throat closed up and she parted her lips to say something, but no words came out. The EPED had structured Kepler into the habitable planet it was today. Her parents had worked extensively with them before she was born, and still did by selling them a portion of their stones each year.
The EPED never returned to a planet that was already settled. Never.
Not unless it has to be re-settled.
Janet met her eyes in the mirror. “I think they’re here about the crops,” she said.
Or because of a disaster. A plague. The loss of countless lives from something native.She kept her thoughts to herself.
Rylie looked away and quickly stripped out of her t-shirt and water-suit, not bothering to wash the ocean off her skin, and pulled on fresh clothes that Janet tossed at her.
“It can’t be good,” Rylie mustered as she shook her head and her hair fell out of its band and around her shoulders.
“That bad? I was hoping...”
“We only visited three jetties down south, all the stones were cloudy. Yours were too, then?”
Janet held the same job as she did, but had taken a liking to managing the homestead with their mother. She never went out as far as Rylie and the other workers. Her sister was as much of a people person as Rylie was a loner.
