As she walked, the grass brushed against her bare legs. Little insects raced away from her and the songs of the winged ones above trilled out into her ears.
How could she have ever lived without knowing those things?
“Jenny?”
A guilty smile filled her face. “I’m sorry. I was just enjoying the sky so much that I forgot I had not answered you, Oliina. It is so very beautiful.” She eyed the basket. “What are you doing today?”
“I’m working on a new room of the hut.” Oliina’s smile went dazzling. “We are expecting a child.”
“Oh!” Her first instinct was to say maybe Oliina should not be carrying such a heavy load. Then she recalled that for Oliina’s race, it was the males who carried the children and birthed them. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you. Have a good day.”
“You too.”
Jenny looked upward again as she crested the last of the hills and began to wind her way down toward the buildings she was working in that day.
She had her very first glimpse of how vast the world was outside her Below home where she had been when she had woken up from the cryo- chamber she had been placed in by armed Capo officers.
She had been convicted of a crime she had never committed. Which was just to say that the Capo had spotted her one day and decided she would be perfect for a bride ship.
A bride ship was a ship that carried human women to outlying planets where women were in short supply. No woman ever actually agreed. Most of the women on the ship had been criminals, or they had simply been pawned away by their fathers or their husbands if their debt had not been repaid.
Or they, like her, had been accused of some petty crime and convicted without even a trial then hustled onto the ship and told they would make a good bride and then sent into cryo-sleep to, in the soldier’s words, make the trip easier.
Really the purpose behind the cryo-chambers was to keep them from being able to resist their new status as brides.
Of course, that had been a lie.
They had been earmarked for delivery to a pleasure planet where they would have been sold to brothels and forced to work off a ‘debt’ that would never lessen, and they would never be able to free themselves of. If it had not been for the wrecking crew that had taken the ship, she might very well be stuck in some pleasure palace right then—and still unable to see the sky!
The Federation knew, of course, that the ship was carrying them to a different destination than the one they had been told they would be arriving at.
The Federation knew, and had always known, what happened to the women that were placed on those ships. The Federation profited from those bodies and women, and they always had.
And the Federation always lied.
Always.
There was rebellion all across the universe at the moment. The Federation was fighting for its very survival. Many beings were tired of being subjugated, of being cast into class systems and depressed due to their species or gender.
She knew that, but that seemed so far away at the moment.
Revant Two was a private planet with little tech or communication with the larger universe. It was a simple place, and it had been designed to stay that way so that it could grow and thrive at a more natural rate. Its resources were plentiful, but it was near no wormholes or trade routes. It had little to offer to any who would plunder it. The nearest planet was also held by survivors of the death of the original Revant system, and they too shunned tech and other things that would make their planet appealing for space and land pirates.
They had no trade interests, no import or export products. They had no fleets but for the few ships piloted by very little, and those ships did bring in needed supplies. They needed supplies because the planet had so little to offer to any advanced race. This made it even less likely to be plundered.
It was the first time in her entire life that Jenny had felt any kind of safety and comfort. It was the first time that she had ever felt like she belonged in the world and that she had a place based on not who she was born to but what she was capable of, and her smile grew wider and longer as she moved forward, heading down the steep hills and away from the small hut that she lived in, and had helped to build as well.
The fact that she had wound up there, on that planet purchased by four brothers, the last of a royal bloodline that had once ruled over a large section of a planet now gone and dead, still seemed so far-fetched to her.
That she did belong, that she would never be forced to live in the stale air and dimness of the Below ever again: it still seemed like a wild dream, a fever dream, and she often prayed that if it was just a dream that she be allowed to sleep forever.
It often did feel like it wasn’t even real. There were times that she would wake up in the middle of the night and find herself having to concrete herself into her current place and situation by taking stock of everything in the small hut that she now lived in.
The hut was mean and simple, made of nothing more than stacked stone carefully mortared with mud and roofed with simple straw held down by cornerstones. But it was the first place she had ever been that was truly hers. Nobody had assigned it to her. There was a small window that let in light and stars shine.
The bed was a simple pallet structure, but it was the finest she had ever had. There were several shelves on the wall, and she was forever finding small things that she found beautiful, and she placed them on the shelves with real pride and often stood at the shelves looking at the small stones, the hollowed out bird’s egg, the seashells, and the delicate and abandoned bird’s nest with true appreciation and joy.
