Sometimes, looking at those things, she would first shiver with joy and then the terrible fear that they were not real, that none of this was real and that at any moment she would wake again, in the six-by-ten-foot room that had been home to her and her family since her birth. The space assigned to them had been small because her father had a labor job and her mother had as well. They earned very little credits, and many of them were taken before the pay dates even arrived. The Federation took their taxes and their due for the space they occupied. They had to pay a tariff for the air pumped into the Below, for the power grids, and everything else the Federation regulated and gave, or withheld for lack of credits.
There had rarely been enough left over for anything beyond the nutro-loaf and coarse bread that so many who lived Below subsisted upon.
Her entire life had been drudgery and darkness. Was it really possible that she had escaped that?
Even when she was awake, there was many a moment when she would have to pinch herself or ground herself into her present reality by dipping her fingers into the grass or the river or by stepping into the ocean.
That last was what kept getting her in trouble.
The sea drew her in a way she could not explain. The water at the shore was shallow and warm and salty, and she would stand in it sometimes for hours just letting it lap against her ankles and legs. She had not known that it would rise so suddenly and that it could carry her out into the depths of the ocean where she would most assuredly drown and die until it had almost happened.
Marik had seen her being dragged away by the tide and he had rushed in to save her, but he had not been happy about the situation. In fact, he called her a silly little idiot.
Marik.
Her heart gave a powerful contraction as she thought about him. He was tall, taller than any human she had ever seen. He stood at least seven feet tall, and his shoulders were broad from so many years of working as a slave in the mines on a mining planet. His arms rippled with muscle, as did his chest. His waist was lean and narrow and his stomach flat but also thick with muscle. His legs were long, and everything about him sent her senses staggering every time she thought about him.
She could not continue to indulge in the small daydreams and fantasies that sometimes leaped into her mind at the sight of him. Unlike his brothers—Renall, Jeval, and Talon—Marik’s eyes were a deep brown. They had a way of looking right into hers and making her feel as if he was seeing things that she would rather he did not see.
Unlike his brothers, he had a gentle air about him despite his massive size and the scars from battle etched across his face and arms. Talon especially frightened her. He was no longer on the planet; he was gone somewhere, probably wrecking Federation ships or engaging in some bloody battle along with one of the women who had also been on the ship with her: — Jessica.
Jessica was a Capo at one point and one of the law officers whose job was to keep order on old Earth.
Old Earth was in chaos. The war had begun there and rebellion had been vicious. Much of the planet had been destroyed centuries before and now even more of it was gone due to the war between the Borlites, the Federation traitors, and the humans and those who had assisted them during that uprising.
The uprising that Jessica and Talon had started!
The very idea of all that fighting made Jenny shudder. Her soul was too gentle and she knew it. Her heart quailed at the very idea of war.
And why wouldn’t it?
She had watched her parents be dragged away, kicking and screaming and begging for their lives, by Capo officers when it had been discovered that her mother had found a way to first collect and then plant seeds in small containers that she hid along no longer used corridors of the Below.
Those small plants, mere herbs and the occasional vegetable, had sometimes been the only thing that stood between them and starvation or illness.
That small bit of freshness from those herbs, that green and textured crispness, was often all that stood between Jenny and despair. It was the knowing that there was something that could grow down there after all that made it better.
And the herbs did prevent illness. Her mother had also managed to first collect and use and then grow things that could create medicine. Her mother had been daring enough to go above ground to get the things that she needed. She had done so with the help of a book that she had Jenny memorize, teaching her how to read from it and how to identify things from it before Jenny was barely old enough to talk.
Her mother had used those things to feed them and quite a few of the people who lived Below. She had used the things that she collected from her excursions, illegal and dangerous as they were, above ground to make medicines that would help those who were in need. She gave the medicine to healers and to those who could not afford to go to the pharmos.
But in the end, it had been a healer who had turned them in. A healer who had been so desperate to save his own life and to get the treatment that he needed for the disease that was killing him that he had gone to the Capo and betrayed her mother.
Her father had, of course, attempted to intervene, to save the life of the woman that he loved. His own death had been assured by that. Jenny had been held back by concerned neighbors and Ben, the man she had been engaged to.
Ben’s strong arms had wrapped around her, and his warm breath had washed across her cheek and ear as he had whispered, “You cannot save them, Jenny. You will simply die too. You must stay with me.”
She had stayed with him. Not only because he was right but because she could not bear to witness the public execution in the center of the Below’s business district.
That was how the Federation operated. They made examples of people who were simply desperate and starving. They killed them but not before they tortured them to try to discover if there were any others engaged in the same activity that they had been caught in.
Her parents had known quite a lot about what happened there, but they had kept their silence. They were stronger than she would’ve been; Jenny was sure of it. She had heard of what happened to people in the interrogation rooms, and she was sure that even if she had not known any of the things that the Capo asked, she would’ve made some things up in an effort to end the torture.
The sound of the wind rushing toward her, flattening the grass and making the leaves of the tall trees rustle and clatter together, the hushed roar and murmur of the ocean on the shore and the sound of the flying creatures above as they called and sang while they made their way across the sky, jerked her out of that terrible past and into the present.
Her eyes went to the small buildings erected along a shining stretch of sandy earth. Everyone was given a job. Everyone did whatever work they felt called to do or were capable of doing. She had yet to find her niche, and so she kept getting bounced from one task to another.
She did not really mind that. She had discovered that she enjoyed learning things and not having one specific skill meant that she was accruing quite a few.
