No.
She was talking. She stood at the counter with her back to me, all that dark hair piled up and slipping loose, both hands going while she argued cheerfully with poor Theeodus about something, her voice pitched to fill the whole room and then some.
Small. They were all small. But she held herself like she was taking up exactly as much space as she pleased and daring the floor to complain.
"...and I'm just saying, if there's a box on the form for 'previously returned,' there should be a box for 'returned by an idiot,' because that's a different statistic and your records are frankly misleading."
Theeodus made a sound like a trodden glidewing.
Her file lay open on the edge of the counter near me; they must have wandered down as she spoke.
I read it the way I read everything, fast and without meaning to, a habit built in a place where missing a detail gets you killed.
Two trial matings.
Two returns.
A flag in red at the top of the page:third placement — final eligibility.
One more rejection, and the Agency shipped her back to wherever she'd come from, and washed its hands.
I'd heard of her, the way a man hears of weather he's stayed indoors through. The loud human down at the Agency, the one that didn't quite fit.
Town talk drifted as far as the forge whether I wanted it or not. But I'd never been near enough to catch her scent because I was never near anything; that was the whole design of my life. It took a summons I hadn't asked for to put me through that human-sized door on the one morning she happened to be standing behind it, and that was all it took. One lungful.
The patient work of all my life undone between one breath and the next.
She was the worst thing in the galaxy I could want. Human and breakable. A body I could snap turning over in my sleep.
And already half gone, a woman the planet itself kept handing back like a parcel addressed incorrectly, with a clock running on her that I could not stop with a hammer or a blade or anything I knew how to make.
I could love her for the rest of my long life and bury her in sixty years if I was lucky, or wave at her ship next month if I wasn't.
The wanting in my core didn't care what I'd decided. It had already decided for me. It sat in my chest, pulling toward her like a hook behind the ribs, and the only thing it left me was the choice of what I did about it.
I made the choice standing there in the doorway with her scent taking me apart.
I would not claim her.
I'd seen what wanting cost. She needed a male who dreamed of a soft, warm wife and a houseful of children and didn't lie awake counting the ways the people he loved could be taken from him.
She started to turn, drawn maybe by the cold off the open door, maybe by the thing in the air that I refused to call a thread.
I left before she saw my face.
I went back to the fire, where things only ever became what I made them, and I told myself it was the heat making my eyes burn.
1
CHLOE
I have been returned moretimes than a library book.
Twice, technically. But two times on a planet where the men outnumber the women roughly a thousand to one and are so desperate for wives they import us by the shipful from the worst parts of Earth. Two times in a place where a woman with a pulse and most of her teeth is supposed to be a hot commodity.
You have to work to get sent back here. You have to be genuinely, impressively unkeepable.
I'm a high achiever. Always have been.
