Survivors (Harmony Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  Jillian tied a scarf over her hair and bundled up in a jacket patched together out of Mariya’s scraps for the long, cold walk. “Too bad you couldn’t have a flitter,” she commiserated with her thuggish escorts. “You must get awfully tired walking all over town to find people.”

  “It’s a job,” grunted one of the men. “It pays. Honest work, y’know.”

  “Not often we’re sent for a lady like you, though.” The other one peered at her. “Hey! Jillian - are you Jillian Lisadel? The wife never misses your show. When d’you expect to start recording again?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jillian. “I expect the studio will send for me when they reopen.” If they could find her… Well, the Ministry for Labor had evidently found “L3529i” with no trouble, and she hadn’t exactly left a forwarding address when she and Trisha moved.

  Her two escorts treated her with awed respect after that, and Jillian’s spirits lifted. This was just a token summons, some bureaucrat throwing his weight about and demonstrating that he could summon anybody regardless of social position or popularity. He wouldn’t try it on anybody with real power, but actresses were fair game. She’d pose for a few holos, make her explanation for the newsers, and be home again in no time.

  The assistant deputy Minister for Labor didn’t see it that way. There were no newsers hanging about, but after Jillian came to his office he sent for someone. Okay, this would be when the cameras and holorecorders –

  Sheri slipped into the office, holding her datapad, and seated herself in the corner.

  “Official summons to Jillian L3529i,” the man at the desk droned, “unmarried, unemployed, no dependents. Six months at Farm Cooperative 6. Congratulations, Citizen, on this opportunity to help feed the people.”

  “I’m afraid there’s some mistake,” Jillian said. “I do have a dependent.”

  The assistant deputy minister looked up. “None registered. An unlicensed child?” A hint of prurient curiosity in his voice.

  “No, my sister-in-law, she’s seven months pregnant and she lives with me.”

  “In-laws are not eligible to be counted as dependents,” the assistant deputy minister said, sounding bored again. “Children of your body, stepchildren, disabled spouses or parents only.”

  “Oh, but – ” Stepping forward to plead her case, Jillian caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the window. The Ministry for Labor was almost as cold as the outdoors; she was still bundled up in her scarf and patched jacket. The assistant deputy minister hadn’t looked beyond the patches. Jillian slid out of the jacket and yanked her scarf off. Her long, light hair tumbled over her shoulders.

  “Ooooh,” Sheri said as if on cue, “it’s Jillian Lisadel, the star!”

  “Don’t be silly,” the assistant deputy minister said, eyes on his list of regulations, “and no talking…”

  Sheri’s words finally penetrated; he looked up and stared as if mesmerized. Jillian moved just a little, to shake out her hair and help it catch the light.

  “Well, this is quite the day for our little Ministry,” said the assistant deputy minister. “My wife will want to hear all about it. Of course I’m a busy man and never watch these trashy holodramas… but I know she’d want me to ask you, when will Love for Living start a new season? The reruns are – I mean, she’s tired of watching reruns.”

  “Probably never,” Jillian said in Ditani’s husky voice, “if I go off to a farming collective.”

  “Oh, that wouldn’t be fair to your fans, would it now? If you’d just explained…”

  ***

  “I felt… sleazy,” Jillian told Trisha when she finally got home. “The pathetic little man slimed all over me. I think he wanted to make me sleep with him for my exemption, but he couldn’t get up the nerve to say it, and Sheri was wonderful – she kept popping in and out with people who wanted to see me in person.”

  “I’m not going to complain about any leverage you used to get out of that summons,” Trisha said. “I couldn’t bear it if you went away now, Jilli. I really couldn’t bear it.” Her dark eyes got larger as she contemplated the horror of it all, and Jillian hurried to change the subject before Trisha got into full disaster mode.

  “Have you had any good ideas about Ruven?”

  “Maybe!” Trisha smiled, immediately sunny again. “But I need you to go next door and go through your costumes. Do we still have that gray smartsilk dress Ditani wore in the second season?”

  Jillian frowned. “That’s kind of plain, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Trisha said decisively, “it’s subtle. It’s got that shimmer that makes your eyes look silver instead of just grey, and the pale silver sets off the pale gold of your hair. The wrap-front bodice makes you look like you’ve got more curves than Nature intended, and – ”

  “Ruven already knows exactly what Nature gave me in the way of curves,” Jillian pointed out. And he seems to find them adequate. “A cleverly cut dress won’t fool him.”

  Trisha waved away her objection. “It’s all about the visual effect. And the wrap is full-length; I remember Galen had to put tabs of stickytape on the inside to keep you from accidentally showing more leg than the Holo Code allows for a family show.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Trisha grinned. “Do you think he’ll be able to resist unwrapping you like a present?”

  “Yes,” Jillian said.

  “No,” she said the next evening, when Trisha told her what to wear with the dress – or rather, what not to wear. “That’s…”

  “Stop right there,” Trisha said. “I don’t want to hear “cheap” or “sleazy,” or “obvious” or anything else you were planning to say. Do you want the man, or don’t you?”

  Jillian swallowed her objections.

  “You’re going to have to surprise him. And anyway, you can’t wear a bra under that dress. So we’re just talking about dispensing with one, tiny, hardly there scrap of a garment.”

  Trisha’s hair styling business had never really caught on in the Donteven; it wasn’t that long after they moved in that she’d gotten too big to stand for long without a backache. But she trimmed the split ends from Jillian’s hair now. Then, under her verbal instructions, Jillian slipped into the dress and brushed her hair until it became a pale, shining cloud about her face and shoulders.

  Not that it would have the same effect by candlelight, which Jillian had long since ceased finding romantic. As the only light source after winter’s early sunset, she felt that “inadequate” was a better description than it deserved. But at least she felt glamorous - and Ruven would get a surprise when he slipped his hands inside the dress. If this didn’t get him into bed with her, Jillian resolved, she would just have to ask him what the problem was.

  Ruven’s intake of breath when she entered his room reassured her that even by the dim light of two small candles, the Creation had an effect. But the candles were an extravagance; she blew them out before he took her in his arms.

  “My love, you’re cold!” he exclaimed. “Whatever possessed you to come out with no more than that on?”

  “I wanted to be glamorous for you, just for once,” Jillian murmured into his shoulder. She was trembling, and yes, part of that was the achingly cold room. But even that was working in her favor, this night; Ruven drew her to his bed and wrapped the coarse blankets around them both, trying to warm her with the heat of his body. The cold made her nipples stand up like little pebbles under the thin smartsilk. She heard Ruven’s intake of breath when he felt them hard against his palms.

  “I can’t stand much more of this,” he mumured into her neck before kissing his way up to her lips.

  Good. She moved against his body, felt the overlapping skirts of the dress part so that when she pressed herself against him, she might as well have been naked from the waist down.

  He ran his hands down the length of her body and jerked, startled, when he encountered bare skin. “Dear girl, you’ll freeze!”

  “You’
ll keep me warm,” she purred. She took one of his hands and moved it to where she wanted it. His whole body stiffened. “Now touch me like you did before,” she thought, confident of success. “Feel how much I want you!”

  Instead he freed himself from the blankets, wrapped them around her and left her sitting alone on the bed. “Don’t try me too hard, Jillian,” he said thickly. “You don’t know what you’re playing at, here. There’s a limit to how much any man can take.”

  “Maybe that’s what I want - to get past your absurd limits,” she shot back.

  “Jillian, you don’t know what you’re saying! It isn’t fair to tease me like this.”

  “I’m not teasing! I’m perfectly willing to follow through.” She was so blazingly angry now that she hardly felt the cold air creeping under the edges of the blankets. “You’re the one who keeps backing away! What is it with you, anyway? Do you think city girls have cooties? Or are you pretending that as long as you don’t actually have sex with me, you’re not being unfaithful to your woman back home?” There; it was out, now.

  “Jillian, what are you saying? You of all people should know I don’t have any other woman. I love you! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “I’m still trying to figure out what it means to you,” she snapped. “If it’s not another girl, what is it? What’s wrong with me? Why don’t you want me?”

  Ruven knelt beside the bed and put his arms around her. Outside the blankets. “Jillian, how can you possibly imagine I don’t want you? You are – you can – discord take it, you know exactly what you do to me! I ache with wanting you. But – think about Trisha, won’t you?”

  “Trisha? What, you don’t think she’d object?”

  “Let’s get this clear,” Ruven said slowly. He sounded more exasperated than anything else. “No man who is a man would risk getting the woman he loves into a fix like Trisha’s, not this winter, not in this crisis. What kind of a rat would I be, Jilli, if I got you pregnant and you couldn’t risk traveling come spring? So please, please stop tempting me like this.”

  “Oh, Ruven.” She rested one hand on his head. A hysterical laugh was threatening to bubble up inside of her. “Did you never hear of a contraceptive implant? Every girl in the City gets sent for one at fifteen. Trisha and my brother had to pass parenting tests, and get recommendations from their community supervisor, before they were allowed to remove the implant and start a baby. Ruven, I can’t get pregnant. Not without having it removed, or skipping my five-year renewal.” Which was coming up soon; she’d be twenty-five in May.

  “Ohhhh...” His arms tightened round her, but the thick, scratchy blankets were still in the way. “I did hear of such things, but only in the past. Nobody up-river has had to get a child license since... oh, before my grandfather’s time, anyway.”

  “I guess the government had been quietly losing control for a long time before the crisis,” Jillian said. “It never occurred to me that you wouldn’t know about implants and child licenses.”

  “And it never occurred to me that inside the city, women were still forced to have them. I must be the biggest fool alive,” he said. “Jillian, my little love, will you share bed and blanket with me?” He dropped his clothes on the floor and dove, shivering, into the warm nest created by her body under the blankets. “Now you’re the one who’s overdressed,” he said, gently tugging the silvery fabric down off her shoulders.

  She could feel his desire in the trembling of his hands, in the long sigh when she slipped out of the dress and they lay body to body, skin to skin in the warm cave of the blankets. But even with all this encouragement, he took his time, kissing and petting her until she was wild for him again before he possessed her as simply as a man coming home to his true love.

  Afterwards she lay pillowed on his broad chest, breathing in the masculine scent of his body, feeling his heart pounding in her ear; satiated, happy, desiring nothing more than to stay exactly where she was forever.

  After a long time, when they were both breathing evenly again, he asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “That I wish I’d seduced you earlier.” She ran a caressing hand down his side.” What are you thinking?”

  “That I wish I’d let you seduce me earlier.” He shifted, trapping her exploring hand between his legs. “Ah well, we’ve got the rest of our lives to make up for lost time.” And from the feel of him, he was ready to start catching up then and there.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In those cold bleak days, Jillian was tempted to spend hours under Ruven’s blankets while they explored each other’s bodies and kept each other warm. But both of them had other duties. Ruven had a major role in the block defense patrol, and when he wasn’t patrolling he was using his experience defending the collective from bandits to train Danyel and Kris and anyone else who was interested. Jillian found new work with some Hill residents who’d used Merdis Abadi’s services as a midwife and healer; the young wife had had a difficult delivery and the husband wanted a woman to do the housekeeping so that his wife wouldn’t be tempted to do too much.

  So they had only a few precious, stolen hours together, whenever neither of them was wanted elsewhere and Jillian could get someone else to sit with Trisha. When they met in his rooms, they came together like magnets and made love with near desperation, hot and hard and fierce; a little warmth and joy snatched from the teeth of this killing winter. “I’m not like this,” he would say sometimes afterward. “I want to be gentler with you, but – oh, my love, I do need you so and we have so little time!”

  “Did I complain?” Jillian kissed his neck and nipped at his earlobes with her sharp little teeth. “I need you too.” He was the only warm thing in a bleak, frozen landscape, the only joy in a life reduced to the daily fight for survival.

  Slowly, inexorably, cold and hunger leached their vitality until even desire failed them. Ruven found a loose tooth, and Jillian learned to sprout a handful of seeds between damp flimsies that she insisted the three of them, Ruven and Trisha and herself, eat daily to ward off scurvy. Jillian’s fine-drawn slenderness turned into gauntness, until she joked that if they did make love, Ruven would cut himself on her pelvic bones.

  Then, overnight, the fierce cold that had gripped the city released its prisoners. The air smelled of dampness and growing things. Clusters of bitter greens pushed their way through cracks in the syncrete; Merdis added them to the thin soup that was all she’d been able to make for weeks, and nobody complained about the taste. And Trisha’s baby came on a chilly spring day when a very faint rain softened the air and misted over the harsh outlines of the broken city.

  “It’s early!” a panicked Jillian said to Merdis. “She wasn’t due for another month – and you said first babies tend to come late! What’s wrong?”

  Merdis held Trisha’s hand until the next contraction passed, then felt her belly. “I think all that’s wrong is that you girls miscounted. Didn’t I tell you when you moved in that she looked more like five months than four to me?”

  “I – want – a doctor!” Trisha gasped. “Hospital!”

  Jillian chewed a knuckle. “You might be better off staying here – if Merdis says everything looks normal – she’s delivered babies before.”

  “Tomas promised there’d be pain blockers.” Trisha was recovering from the contraction. “He promised – Jillian, get me to the hospital! I can’t do this here. You promised I wouldn’t have to have his baby here.”

  Jillian turned to Merdis. The older woman drew her aside. “Best do as she says. That one is likely to get hysterical otherwise, and she can’t afford to waste her strength. And to be honest, I’d as soon not have the responsibility.”

  “I thought you said everything was normal!” Jillian whispered.

  “As normal as can be under the circumstances. She hasn’t been getting any exercise – yes, I know it’s not your fault. But nature counts on using a woman’s own muscles to get that baby out, and I don’t think Trisha has the strength – or
the energy. It will be much worse if she wears herself out and we have to get her to the hospital then. At least now she can walk; in fact, it’ll be good for her.”

  Trisha cried hysterically that she couldn’t walk, could never make it down the stairs, and they were at an impasse until Ruven, coming in from foraging, heard her screams. “Wrap those blankets round her,” he told Jillian, and picked Trisha up in his arms like a baby.

  “Hush, hush, it’s going to be all right,” he told her as he carried her down the stairs. Jillian thought his knees almost buckled once. None of them had any strength to spare.

  “I’ll do,” he told Jillian. “She’s a little feather of a thing.”

  Surprisingly, Trisha chuckled. “And here I was feeling as big as a float – Jillian, can’t you get a float? I…” Her voice trailed off and she reached for Jillian’s hand. “Oh – oh – oh!”

  Jillian wondered what they would do if the baby started coming when they were halfway to the hospital.

  She might have spared herself that worry; Trisha had many hours of labor to endure yet. And at the hospital, there were no pain blockers, no Merdis to encourage her to keep calm, and hardly a doctor to be seen. Ruven had to lay Trisha down on a mattress on the floor, after Jillian took the blankets and spread one over the mattress.

  “What if I get blood on it?” Trisha whimpered.

  “What if you do? Blood washes out in cold water, and concord knows we’ve got plenty of that.” What Jillian didn’t want to say was that anything was better than coming into contact with a filthy mattress that looked as if people had been dying on it continuously since the beginning of winter. “Ruven, can’t you find a doctor?”

  He disappeared for a surprisingly long time and then returned with a tired, brusque man who flipped up the covering blanket, gave Trish a quick examination that made her squeak with pain, then told Jillian not to bother him again. “She’s barely dilated; hours to go yet. I’ve got patients who need me right now.”