Curtis was still thinking of Luxinda. He ached for her like a fried egg wanting salt. “Let’s call it a day, Trainee Assistant. Oh, and I forgot to mention – tomorrow I’ll be going to the mainland for the day.”
“Perhaps I’ll begin the day after that then.” She noticed Curtis was absently gazing through the window as if thinking hard about something. “I suppose you’re going to see if you can get in to see Luxinda again,” she said.
“If you must know, Janux, yes. I’m the father of her unborn child, so it’s my duty to try and get her out of there.”
Janux realised how much she hated the fact that Curtis, the man she loved, also loved another woman and had made her pregnant. But she tried to keep her feelings in check. “I’ll wait until you come back then before interviewing the neighbours.”
“Yes, yes, I need to be with you because I still think you’re in danger.” He looked at her with a feeling of hopelessness. He knew the power and cunning of the pure-bloods and this was no time for complacency. He also knew that Janux was hurting because of his love for Luxinda.
CHAPTER 15
Curtis left the house as soon as they’d had a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon. Janux was going to continue with her research into the female origins of the telepathy gene.
She’d already created a new folder on her laptop, listing the women she knew had the gene. She kept this secure by following the procedure taught her by Curtis in her training. He was adamant she must use a high-security password to store all information relating to their work. Thus she now had a 63-character password, acquired from a cryptographically strong pseudo-random-number generator she’d found on the internet. She kept a copy of the password on a flash-drive and carried it with her on a leather thong around her neck.
The list of women was short – herself, Nayxana and Lodax. She wondered if the murdered woman Constable Melvyn had told them about was also one of ‘the known’. Janux made a note to find out who this woman was. Neither she nor Curtis had recalled ever reading about her death in the papers which added to the intrigue.
Janux touched the tiny bump on the back of her neck and quietly cursed, then pushed the thoughts of the H-Police and their power aside as she sat before her tiny laptop. Her thoughts were soon transported to the business of gaining access to the website of Kieran, which demanded a new password and proof of identity for each entry. The site held a vast amount of Ryxin knowledge – folklore, language and up-to-date ancestry lines of every Ryxin on Earth, no matter whether half-blood or pure-blood.
When Janux finally attained access it took some time and copious questions before she was allowed any information at all about Queen Ryxin 1st. She viewed the online file, and her first reaction was that the information had been doctored – it seemed to be very much abbreviated. Probably on the orders of King Dymon 3rd, she thought, since Kieran himself and all the subsequent Kierans now holding the entire history of Ryxins on planet Earth were known to always be scrupulously honest.
Besides being revered for his total honesty, Kieran was also considered to have other special powers which were so mysterious as to be virtually supernatural. No one was allowed to question him and all Ryxins believed in his god-like status. Although Janux recalled Curtis carefully sidestepping her request for them both to pray to Kieran and ask for inspiration to solve their current case.
Further probing by Janux – helped by one of Kieran’s staff members - revealed a document which Janux was told very few had ever read. The gist of it was that around the time their sun began to die King Dymon 3rd had proclaimed that he was banning all information regarding his mother, Queen Ryxin 1st, except that which he and his advisers wished to release to the general population of whichever planet they ultimately settled on. This was about the time when the whole population of Ryxin had to leave their planet in groups of 150, sometimes more, and find homes throughout the galaxy or face extinction within six months.
Janux knew enough about her own ancestry to know how her father, Eamon Lennan 2nd had come to be born a half-blood Ryxin. She hadn’t thought this information very important at the time, but it was different now she wanted to find out how she came to have the telepathy gene. According to Ma Keoghan any female children of a woman with the gene would automatically inherit it. Male offspring were born with the ability to pass the gene on to their female offspring too – something previously impossible. In this way Queen Ryxina had made sure the gene was never going to be lost to females down through the generations to come.
Janux was fascinated. So who were her father’s ancestors? She logged a request for any information about Eamon Lennan 1st and his forebears and discovered there were no restrictions placed on him since his name was Human and didn’t trigger an alert. Things were looking up.
Within another ten minutes her father’s complete ancestry was before her. It began in 1905 when the first Ryxins came to Earth and ten handpicked men and women were paired off by Oro Garvey 1st and ordered to marry.
In this way, Iggy Tretze 1st was ordered to marry a beautiful Ryxin woman called Garxie.
Garxie was a free spirit and didn’t agree with Oro Garvey’s order. She didn’t even like Iggy and wasn’t about to let him get her pregnant on someone else’s orders. So even though she still had to marry him, she refused to allow him to sleep with her until she was older. Fortunately for Garxie he was a patient man and understood her position. She was only sixteen and Iggy was thirty when they married. So they came to an agreement that their sexual relations would only begin when Garxie turned twenty-one.
On Garxie’s twenty-first birthday she and Iggy slept together for the first time, and she became pregnant with the first of five girls in 1910. The second girl, Niamh, was born in 1911 and it was she who was to begin the line of ancestors through which Janux was brought into the world. By 1947 the Ryxin Breeding Laws had been passed and Ryxins who married their own kind were forbidden from having children.
So it was that Niamh’s daughter married a Human male, Eamon Lennan 1st. And they had a half-blood son who besides having the telepathy gene was also a carrier of it for any daughters he and a future wife might have. Twenty-six years later Eamon Lennan 2nd married a Human woman. Their daughter, Janux, was born the following year, 1975. She was a half-blood like her father, and had also inherited the telepathy gene.
After gaining permission from Kieran, Janux copied and pasted the information she needed and saved it on her laptop. It would be safe since no one could hope to guess her high-quality password. Then she sat back and wiped the tears from her eyes. So Ma Keoghan was right – Janux was distantly related to Garxie through her second daughter. Why had she never thought to explore her ancestry before? Though there’d never seemed to be a reason to do so. Her marriage to Roscoe had been happy, albeit scarred by the knowledge they could not have children of their own. The fear of a twenty-year prison term was enough to deter any sensible Ryxin, especially since they’d never heard of a single case where leniency had been applied by the Human justice system. If anything, the harshness of the sentence was carried out perfunctorily as if Ryxin rights were non-existent.
Janux felt the back of her neck again, where the pea-sized lump was now permanently in place. Her medium-length blond hair covered the area, but the memory of that day sent a chill down her spine. All Ryxins were considered second-class citizens and in places like the People’s Microchip Centre this fact had been brought home explicitly to Janux. She thought of the friendly, courteous way the Human man had been treated and immediately began to feel a growing tension just as she had at the time.
If only Curtis were here.
CHAPTER 16
Curtis had arranged to meet Ixola at the ferry terminal and by 10 a.m. the ferry was stolidly ploughing its way to the mainland. Curtis and Ixola sat downstairs and discussed what was to happen. He was to wait in a nearby café while Ixola went to the Home for Single Mothers and explained she’d like to visit her old friend, Luxinda. Ixola wasn’t sure t
hey’d let a discarded woman back into the fortress-like building but she was willing to try. She had no other source of income besides Curtis’s wage and was desperate to avoid becoming an elderly male’s mating partner just to survive. Now was her chance to try and make a life for herself, no matter how difficult. Besides, she trusted Curtis not to abandon her.
“I haves the baby clothes withs me,” she said, before ravenously devouring a date scone she’d bought from the ferry terminal coffee shop. After a long slurp of coffee to wash it down, she pulled the baby clothes out of their brown paper wrapping and showed Curtis. There was a one-piece stretch-and-grow, a beanie and two bibs.
“You must try and find out when Luxinda is having the baby,” Curtis said, “and where she’s being sent.”
“Theys tolds us our babies hads to go into a nursery with alls the others,” Ixola said. “Thens we were sents to another place untils we were ready to goes backs to Xlesky Street.”
Curtis was disgusted at the way these women were treated, just like incubators for the Ryxin slave market. He determined to somehow rescue both Luxinda and their baby. “Come on, let’s go up on deck. We’ll be arriving soon.”
They both stood by the railings at the side of the ferry, and as they were going over the plan again Curtis noticed a man standing to their right in a black duffle coat and with a hoodie pulled down over his head. Curtis sensed there was something familiar about him and decided to risk sending him a message.
The man turned and to Curtis’s astonishment it was Jack Garvey, but not the way he remembered him. Gone was the fresh-faced boyish look. He was unshaven and thin, and his pale-green eyes stared at Curtis from a wan and drawn countenance.
Curtis held out his hand. “Jack, what’s happened to you?”
“It’s my girl,” Jack said in a low voice. “I’m going to try again to see her. She’s in a home in Lenixx Street and they won’t let me in. But I can’t give up – she’s having our baby soon and I’ve got to bloody get her out of there.”
“Do you know her name?” Curtis asked him, recalling how Jack had been kidnapped and taken to a special place to get one of the pure-blood girls pregnant.
“No, I only knew her as Number 10. Once I fell out with Sly Onyx and stopped cooperating with their lot I’ve been treated just like any other father. Kept shut out, man and that’s not something I’ll ever forgive them for. My girl’s only sixteen, same as me. She’s being treated like dirt now they know I’m not on their side any more. I can’t let that happen. I swear I’ll kill anyone who hurts her.”
“My girl was Number 17,” Curtis said. “She’s now called Luxinda and must be due to give birth in a month or so. Ixola here is going to try and get in. If she does she can try to find out what your girl’s name is now.”
“The pigs won’t tell me her name. They keep telling me to go away. I keep saying her name is Number 10 but they won’t accept that. What is her pregnancy name, they keep asking me. And where is my visitor’s permit?”
“Once the girls get pregnant they become someone in the Ryxin world. No one gets a name unless they’ve served in some way. For women the service is giving a baby. For child slaves it’s when they become adopted servant-children. Otherwise they remain as numbers and probably catalogued in a file. Come with us and you and I’ll wait and see if they let Ixola in.”
“Why would they let her in and not us?”
“Ixola was once interned there too. But she had a miscarriage and was sent back to Muritai. They don’t like failures. She’s going to say she wants to visit one of her friends.”
“It’s like a bloody prison. I’ve been watching the place from a distance and the windows are blacked out so how do I know she’s still in there? There’s cars coming and going all the time.”
“Don’t worry, if she’s still pregnant she will be.”
The ferry had chugged its way into the dock and the gangplank was being lowered.
“We’ll wait in a nearby café. Ixola will have to go in alone, I’m afraid.”
Ixola was trembling with fear but she tried to put on a brave face. “I cans do it. I haves baby clothes.”
“She told me she used to see other women visiting when she was there,” Curtis told Jack, “though apparently they were permitted only one visit per month. And no men were allowed in at all.”
The trio made their way to Lenixx Street and Curtis noticed how slowly Jack was walking.
“Where are you living now?” he asked.
“I’m still living with Pop. My parents have decided to stay in Ireland for the rest of the year. They may even end up staying there permanently.”
“How is Siegfried?”
“He won’t be running for mayor again this year. He doesn’t agree with some of the H-government plans, like the Microchip Law. He opposed that but got nowhere.”
“Don’t forget,” Curtis told Ixola. “Make sure no one hears you asking about where Luxinda will be going when she’s had the baby. That would make them even more suspicious of you.”
Curtis saw fear in Ixola’s eyes. After all, they had considered her to be a failure and discarded her like a piece of rubbish when she had her third miscarriage. Why would they treat her any differently now?
“I will says that I have comes to supports the Ryxin cause bys bringing baby clothes.”
“Atta girl,” he said.
“Good luck, sister,” Jack said.
Ixola was more afraid than when she was sent to the Lenixx Street house to prepare for giving birth. At least then she was fed properly and allowed to rest. Once she’d had the miscarriage all that had changed. She had to sleep at the back of the house then, with two other women who were also going to be discarded. They were made to do dishes and clean floors until it was time for them to be sent away, and every day they were told how shameful it was to lose a baby and that they would never be any use to a man ever again, except as a common slave which was all they deserved. Ixola had been sent back to Muritai wearing old clothes that had been handed to her by one of the staff members and were too big for her.
And now, here she was, back again. She walked up to the heavy wooden door and pushed the button.
“Please state the purpose of your visit,” a metallic voice asked.
“To visits Luxinda,” Ixola answered.
“Do you have a permit?”
Ixola gasped. “No, but I used to lives here whens I was pregnant. She knows me.”
There was a pause and a clicking noise. “What is your pregnancy name?”
“Ixola.”
“You were a failure and subsequently discarded. Why have you come back?”
“I wants to sees my friend,” Ixola stammered. “I have some baby clothes for her.”
“The baby clothes are not for the mothers to have. They must be given to a staff member for the nursery. How many clothes did you bring?”
“I haves brought a stretch-and-grow outfit, a beanie ands two bibs.”
There was another pause and a murmur of voices in the background. Ixola strained to hear what was being said. It sounded as if two women were arguing about whether to let her in or not.
Then the same metallic voice spoke again. “I have been instructed to allow you to visit Luxinda. You are to come in as soon as the door opens and show us the clothes you have brought.”
Ixola was ecstatic but didn’t look round. She didn’t want the woman to know Curtis and Jack were watching from the cafe. She knew from when she lived there that cameras were trained on anyone who came to the door.
She entered the building when the heavy wooden doors swung open. The room was dark and she struggled to see as she was roughly grabbed by the arms.
“Bend your head,” a gruff woman’s voice ordered.
Ixola did so and felt a hand holding her head down followed by three loud beeps as her microchip was scanned. The room smelled musty and she could hear dogs whining and whimpering in the distance. She was then released and the package of baby clothes was r
ipped from her hands before she could protest.
“Wait,” the same voice said. Ixola saw that the voice belonged to a large woman dressed in black who was frowning at her and holding the package. “Open the parcel,” she ordered a young girl, handing it to her.
Ixola saw the girl tearing at the brown paper. “Hurry,” the woman demanded. The young girl finally managed to open the parcel. “Show me,” the older woman said and the girl held up the items one by one. “I’ll take those.” The woman put out her hand for them. “Escort her through and stay with them,” she ordered the girl.
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl answered and she led Ixola down a familiar narrow corridor to a room where five women were seated around a table, drinking from mugs. None of them looked up as Ixola and the girl entered, but once the girl had shut the door behind them all five looked at them expectantly.
“A visitor for Luxinda,” the girl said. “Where is she?”
“The master ordered her to work in the laundry today,” a blonde, curly-headed woman said.
“Wait here,” the young girl said. “I’ll get her.”
“Come and sit down with us,” the blonde one said. “I’m Nanxy.”
Nanxy poured her a cup of strong tea from a large pot in the middle of the table and Ixola sat down with the group of women, who all smiled at her hopefully as if she were going to somehow save them.
She noticed there was a framed photo on the wall of the man known to them as The Master. His face was like that of an ex-boxer, crooked and broken looking. At the bottom of the frame were the words: Ferdy Xyle (Master of the Ryxin Breeding Programme). Their former master, Sly Onyx, had brought fear to every Ryxin woman’s heart, but this new master brought terror.
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