by Maren Smith
But then, the ordeal wasn’t exactly over yet, was it?
“And when we are forgotten?” Brinley asked, afraid she already knew the answer. “What happens then?”
“If you think we intend to wait for all this ruction to die down before we drag you out to the swamps and bury you where the peat and decay will forever guard the secret of your demise, kindly keep in mind that we could have shot you at the prison and made everyone much happier than our current solution has.”
If he was waiting for her to thank him, he would be waiting a very long time. Brinley locked her jaw, finding nothing in her current situation that warranted even the smallest degree of gratitude. Except perhaps the fact that he could have had her killed, but hadn’t. He could have left her in the prison hospital too, under the dubious care of that doctor, but he hadn’t done that either. She didn’t know why he’d chosen to spare her, to “foster” her, but he had. She wished she knew the reason.
He noticed her silence and it was enough to distract him from the news. “I sense you are unhappy.”
“You think?” Brinley asked caustically. “What could I possibly have to be unhappy ab—oh, wait.” She held up her bound wrists in emphasis. “Among many other reasons, this might have something to do with why.”
“That is a temporary security measure and one that will eventually be discarded.” He turned back to his news.
“When?”
“Just as soon as I can trust you. Five… perhaps ten years from now.”
Five or ten years? Her temper spiked again. “Maybe if I knew I was going to be treated fairly in a place that isn’t another prison, I’d be more willing to be trustworthy.”
He stared at her for so long she began checking the open stretch of rail ahead of them.
“Do you want me to drive?” she offered.
“No.”
“Then would you? One fiery crash per lifetime is enough for anybody.” She settled back in her seat, fidgeting with the cuffs, twisting her wrists until it felt as if the rough plastic edges were cutting into them. “Watch the road.”
“We aren’t going to crash, fiery or otherwise,” Rowth soothed again. “It’s all perfectly automated, and I’m not taking you to another prison. I’m taking you to my home.”
“Can I leave?” she demanded.
“No.”
“Then it’s a prison. Watch the road.”
“I don’t need to ‘watch the road’,” Rowth said, not quite rolling his eyes. “The shuttle can handle itself.”
“If that were true, it wouldn’t come with controls. If you can’t trust your own car, what hope do I have?”
“Why do I feel you are trying to start an argument with me?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Brinley said, too busy clutching the handle to notice the warning in his frown. “Maybe because you drugged me, you’re holding me prisoner, and now you’re trying to scare the shit out of—watch the damn road! Oh my God, slow down!” Was it her imagination or did she really just feel the car come off the rails on that last corner? “You’re trying to kill me, you sadistic—”
“Watch your tone.” Releasing the controls, Rowth sat back in his seat far enough to face her fully. “You are fine. You are safe. But you might not be if you speak to me like that again. Let me explain something you seem not to have realized. I am the only person responsible for your current and future wellbeing, and there are consequences associated with trying to upset me for no good reason.”
“No good reason?” Letting go of the handle, Brinley shook her bound wrists at him. “Think about it carefully. No good reason?”
“Nobody upsets me,” Rowth replied. “Think about that carefully. Nobody. Not one person on the whole of this planet.”
She gave him a toothy, unamused smile. “Not anymore.”
“Do you want me to take you to the cellar first thing when we get home?” He said it as if it were a threat. “Because if you do, I have an old barrel that you may well find yourself stretched over before the night is out.”
Her smile vanished even as her eyebrows rose. “What, like stretched on a rack? What comes next, flogging? Waterboarding? Are you going to stick an anal pear up my ass and see how wide you can open it before I scream?”
His expression underwent the most subtle change, drifting from unreadable to damned unreadable, but with a touch of approval. “So, your people have a precedent.”
“Only if you’re Torquemada.” When he only blinked at her, she grudgingly supplied, “He was a Grand Inquisitor several hundred years ago.”
“Inquisitor?”
“A religious torturer during the Spanish Inquisition.”
Shifting in his chair, Rowth put his hands back on the vehicle’s control stick. “My translator is having difficulties with much of what you say, but I am not your Torquemada. However, magistrates do often make inquiries, so I suppose that does make me an inquisitor of a sort.” He studied the rail ahead of them. “And I am rather grand.” She stared at him, silent in her incredulity, until he added, “You’d do well to keep that in mind, too, before you go deliberately seeking ways to prick my temper.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she deadpanned.
He shrugged. “You’re an alien, a female, and incredibly young. For a short time, at least, I am willing to be both patient and stern while you learn how best to mold yourself to our ways and become a productive member of society.”
Productive member of society? Brinley quickly faced the window, staring aimlessly out at the rocky landscaped, sprinkled with carefully cultivated lush lawn-pockets, red rock and sand, all rapidly flashing past them. It hurt her eyes to try and lock in on any of them. “I don’t need your patience or your severity. I’m already a productive member of society.”
“Sternness,” he corrected her. “I save my severity for those occasions when something more is required. And, being a productive member in your society does not make you the same in ours. There is not here, do you understand? Since you cannot return to your world, we must make you a worthy citizen in ours.”
“I’m not three.” She blinked, the sudden sting in her eyes forming tears against her will. “Despite some similarities, I know this isn’t Earth.”
“Why does that make you angry?”
Because it wasn’t supposed to go like this. Brinley stared at the passing landscape, fighting hard to keep her breathing slow and even and free of the tearful hitches she could feel rising up to choke her. But then, right from the beginning, everyone with a security clearance high enough to know where the SS Reconnaissance was actually headed, had told her that although they had some good guesses to work from, nobody really knew what Zeta-12 would be like. The first colonization of a planet outside their solar system, and she had barely stopped to think before signing on for that trip. Because even with her brain locked in shock from the offer NASA had laid before her, she had jumped to accept, knowing she would say goodbye to Earth and everyone she knew and loved. She’d done it knowing this would be a one-way trip with no plans or provisions, no matter what happened, to bring anyone back home again; knowing she was only part two in a process of twelve, the latter half of which was scheduled to be completed long after she was dead, so there would be very few luxuries. Because terraforming took time, damn it. Time and care and the selfless sacrifices of more than a hundred people over a dozen missions, all of whom, like her, would be willing to spend the rest of their lives in a bare-bones box, with nothing to do but work, and read the same six books, play the same stupid card games, write in the same boring journals, and perform the same repetitive tasks over and over and over again.
But that was all okay, because she had signed on for that. She had been braced for it. But this… she wasn’t at all braced for this and it made her angry!
She’d been robbed of her history-making adventure. No one would ever know how, when, or why their ship had failed to reach its destination. No one would know she and her four surviving companions were go
She was angry because she was homesick, which she had always known she would be, except that now she was homesick on the wrong planet. She missed her parents, her dog, and that little hole-in-the-wall restaurant around the corner from where she used to live (not to mention the world’s best chili cheese fries served there at half price every afternoon between two and four) because she was on the wrong planet!
She was angry because she was in handcuffs she didn’t think she’d earned and had been found both guilty and, apparently, incompetent in a trial she hadn’t even known was being conducted.
She was angry because she knew she ought to be grateful for the medical care that she undoubtedly would have died without, and yet she was so damned sore, in both of her hips, her ankles, and even her ribs where the tubes had been threaded in and out of her various organs to aid their functioning until she healed enough not to need them anymore. She ought to be extremely grateful not to be dead, or worse, clinging to life the way she would have been with those same kinds of injuries back on Earth, where their medical advancements were nowhere near as advanced as Rowth’s.
She should have been any number of things, but she wasn’t. All she was, was angry. Sulky, pouty, nameless, faceless angry. So much so that she could have tacked any number of excuses to the feeling, but deep down inside she knew that’s all they were: excuses. She was just… mad.
She swallowed, trying so hard to keep it locked down inside her. “Look, I know I’m going to have to make some adjustments, but so are you.”
Rowth slid her a sideways glance as he considered that. “No,” he eventually concluded. “No, I don’t believe that’s appropriate or accurate.”
Her sarcasm became impossible to curtail. “Oh, you mean like it’s neither appropriate nor accurate to put me into your juvenile offenders’ program?”
“That was entirely appropriate.” His eyebrows quirked. “Is your translator functioning correctly? Are my sentences making sense to you?”
“I’m twenty-six,” she enunciated.
“Yes, twenty-six. I understand that,” he confirmed, and then accused, “Infant.”
“I meant, years!” she spat.
“Watch your tone,” he said, his own hardening. “I understand you meant years. Now you may understand that the positively geriatric age of twenty and six is still nine years shy of legal parental emancipation.”
“You consider your kids adults only after they reach thirty-five?” she asked, certain he had to be lying.
“You don’t?” he countered.
“Eighteen,” she told him.
He gave her the most incredulous look. “Small wonder you’re so ill-behaved,” he said and faced the road again.
“Ill-behaved?” Brinley echoed, frosty warning dripping off all three syllables. “What exactly about my behavior do you find so bloody objectionable?”
He moved so fast, she didn’t see what he did beyond yanking on the joystick that made the bullet they were riding in stop—fast. If not for her chest harness and lap belt, she’d have slid right off the seat and face-planted against the console.
“Jesus!” she gasped, catching the back of her neck with cuffed hands.
Rowth snapped around in his seat. “Bleeding?” He grabbed her chest, checking her paper gown. “What’s bleeding? When did it start?”
She slapped his hand before he could press on her stomach. “Nothing’s bleeding, you idiot! I said bloody, but maybe what I should have said is damned. How’s your translator with that word? Do you understand damned?”
She had to work to keep her voice from rising, growing shrill with all the anger she fought to suppress.
“The religious consequence or damned, the expletive?”
Brinley lost it. She felt that fragile snap as her temper broke from its final restraint to ride a flaming wave right up the back of her neck, burrowing in under her skull and turning everything to monochromatic red. Her ears rang; it even sounded red.
“Fuck you.” Yanking at her lap belt, she jerked her way out of the harness, but no matter where she slapped, smacked or shoulder butted the door, it refused to open for her. “Let me out!”
“Not until you calm down.”
Seething, she threw herself back in her chair, glaring at the console while she controlled her breathing, at least, enough not to show how enraged she really was. She doubted she was very successful. When she looked at him, she suspected he could read the murderous intent in the fiery depths of her green eyes. “Let me out, please.”
“And allow you to go where?”
“As far away as I can get before I kill you with my bare hands.”
“Denied. Your legs can’t support you yet. We’ve never grown so much new bone in so short a time on any one person before, much less an alien species. From knees to toes, you’re really quite brittle.”
“I won’t walk. I’ll crawl.”
He gave her demand a whole half-second’s thought. “Denied. I don’t believe you are ready for society at large, and society at large is definitely not ready for you. Especially, not Oola Fairnscast.”
She didn’t even blink. “Who?”
“Oola Fairnscast; the elderly woman whose house this is.” Rowth indicated out the passenger window to a house set well back from the rails. It took Brinley several seconds to notice the sandstone rock and reflective glass windows of a single-story building tucked behind a curtain of green and amber trees with a flowering garden that sprawled in all directions around it. “After what she’s seen on the news, if she finds you crawling through her pink butterpuffs and gully ferns, she’s apt to have a fatal palpitation. Then we’ll both be arrested—you for criminal mischief and me for allowing it. I have no desire to sample the shame associated with having to try myself for any crime much less one so laughably beneath me.”
While Brinley did a slow burn under all those increasing shades of red, he tucked her back into her harness, tightened down the lap belt, and started the car again. She fumed while he drove. Pissed as she was, it took two more houses before she thought to ask how he could possibly have known whose house that was. But then, they had only passed two more houses before he turned off the main rail and slowed down, gliding to a stop in front of a wide black gate and tall sandstone fence that completely surrounded a densely treed parcel of property. Rowth said nothing, nor did she see him press any buttons. After only a few second’s pause, the gate swung open to admit him into the shadows of those tall sheltering trees. Once she recognized this as an individual driveway rather than a secondary gated community, the mystery solved itself. He knew Oola Fairnscast because he was her neighbor.
Rowth’s house looked like one large room, built perilously close to the edge of a sheer and rocky cliff. The driveway had been cobblestoned, with a path that branched off between two empty flowerbeds before seeming to vanish over the edge of the cliff. The structure itself was built of the same pinkish-beige sandstone as the gated fence, but unlike his neighbor’s home, the four-panel wall he parked in front of had no windows.
“This your house?” she asked, staring at the rather box-like house. Although larger than her own single-bedroom apartment back on Earth, it was considerably less than impressive when compared to the houses she had seen driving up to the gate. “Being a magistrate doesn’t pay much, does it?”
“This is the shuttle house,” he said drily. Again, she never saw him tap a button, but one of the four sections of wall moved, sliding to the right to reveal one of four vehicle stalls in a pristine garage. The car glided forward, trading the shade of the outside world for the interior shade of the building. The floor was cool, gray tile and completely void of any kind of stain. It was completely void of any other vehicles, as well. The two stalls to the right of her and the one to Rowth’s left were all neat, clean, and empty.
Half a dozen cupboards lined the left and forward walls. A massive floor-to-ceiling storage system had been built into the right-hand wall. All were closed, keeping anything that might exist within this garage (apart from his silver bullet of a floating car) completely hidden. There were no paint cans, no storage boxes, no tools, old chairs, or camping equipment—nothing that would have been perfectly at home in any garage on Earth. Not so much as a rag hung out of place or a leaf dirtied the floor; she knew, because Brinley flattened against the window to look.
“Wow,” she said, not sure if she should be impressed or appalled. “You do not want me living here.”
A flash of exasperation touched his eyes, but it was gone in the time it took him to blink, then shake his head. “Of course not. I told you, this is the shuttle house.” He unstrapped himself and shouldered the door open. “I’ll make an appointment in the morning to have your translator checked.”
“No, I meant—” She cut herself off with a growl when he shut the door on her. Frowning, she watched him circle the shuttle to her door. She’d have loved to lock it on him, but every function the car had seemed in tune with whatever he wanted. He touched the door and she heard the internal click of a lock disengaging. He opened it, letting in a gust of fresh sea air and the faint whisper of ocean waves rolling in to kiss the land. Wordlessly, she offered him her wrists. “It’d be easier to walk if I could hold onto things, and I could hold onto things better if I weren’t shackled.”
Again, that touch of exasperation played across his features before vanishing. “You’re not going to walk in from the car any more than you walked out to it.”
And just like that, Brinley had visions of SWAT-like officers rushing her from every corner of the immaculate garage, shooting tranquilizing darts while she dove under the dash. “You said you weren’t ever going to do that again,” she accused.
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