by Gini Koch
“A little late on the save there, James.”
“This is sucking more than normal,” he said in a low voice. “We’ve already had Kevin’s authority to make any decisions questioned. It’s not a pretty place for a regular human right now.”
“Why not?”
Reader shot a look over his shoulder. “Want my honest opinion?”
“Always.”
“They’re all jealous as hell of Jeff and Christopher. We work with them, so they’re taking out what they can on us.”
We reached the others now, and I was introduced. I knew I looked like crap—most of us did, Alfred included. But the looks I got from the men weren’t what I was expecting. To a man they checked me out, and I didn’t get the “you’re not good enough for our boy” reactions—I got a lot of wide, friendly smiles.
I couldn’t keep any of their names straight—and I stopped trying after a bit. Somewhere along I’d learn them if I had to. Otherwise, I just wanted to get to the table and eat something, anything.
Alfred extracted me. “Come and meet the girls,” he said, as if this were going to be fun for me. I said my regretful good-byes to the males, shot a desperate look at Martini and Christopher, but they were both too occupied to notice I was leaving the room. On my own. I got that gallows feeling again.
We went through a huge hallway into the largest kitchen I’d ever seen outside of a restaurant. There were fewer people in here, but all of them were women. A-Cs were very traditional, and apparently they’d happily taken on prior-day Earth standards. All the women looked perfectly put together and were, naturally, gorgeous. Claudia and Lorraine were bustling about, helping out, and chattering away to women I assumed were Martini’s sisters.
There was an older woman who seemed to be running everything, and it didn’t take genius to figure she was Martini’s mother. She looked like a slender, smaller, female version of Richard White, which made sense since she was his sister. She had streaks of gray in her hair, but they just made her look exotic.
Alfred cleared his throat, and all the female heads turned. “Everyone, this is Kitty Katt, Jeffrey’s girlfriend. Kitty, my wife, Lucinda.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Martini.”
“Is she a stripper?” I heard one of the women hiss to Claudia.
“No!” Claudia hissed back.“She’s the head of Airborne!”
I let it pass and waved. “Nice to meet you all.” I was human, I could actually lie well.
Unlike their male counterparts, none of these women looked happy to see me, other than Claudia and Lorraine. Martini’s mother plastered a smile onto her face. “How nice to finally get to meet you. I’d hoped Jeffrey would bring you by sooner, and not because of work.”
“Well, he’s wanted to,” I lied, keeping a happy smile on my face. “But you know, we’ve been so busy, one national and international emergency after another. Hard to find the time.”
“Clearly. Hard to be on time, either.”
I let it pass. “Evil doesn’t keep nine to five hours.”
“Quaint. These are my daughters—Sylvia, Elizabeth, Constance, Lauren, and Marianne.”
“Nice to meet you all.” I assumed she’d called them out in age order. They all looked like their mother. They all gave me forced smiles. Okay, Martini’s women really didn’t like me.
There were a couple of other women in here who didn’t look like family. A mother-daughter team, if I had to guess. “And this is Barbara and her daughter, Doreen.” The older one glared at me, the younger one looked at her hands.
“Nice to meet you, too. Are you cousins?”
“No,” Barbara said icily. “Doreen is Jeffrey’s intended.”
CHAPTER 49
“BEG PARDON?” I could have sworn she said something that didn’t compute.
“Doreen is Jeffrey’s intended,” Barbara repeated again. “They are betrothed. Supposed to marry. Do you need another definition?”
“No, got it.” I looked around. Claudia and Lorraine looked both shocked and freaked in that bad, “we should have seen this coming” way. All the other women looked triumphant. Other than Marianne, the youngest sister. She looked resigned and a bit unhappy. “Interesting. So, has Jeff agreed to this?”
“It’s not his to agree any more,” his mother said.
“Oh, really? Why is that?”
“We have traditions, we have rules. Jeffrey is thirty years old, and it’s time for him to declare for someone.” Ah, that declaration thing Michael had mentioned.
“What about Christopher? Is he required to declare, too?”
Eye shifting. I loved A-Cs—even their women couldn’t lie. “No,” Lucinda said.
“Really? Why not? He’s the same age as Jeff.” Not that I wanted them to drag Christopher off into an arranged marriage, either, but I had to keep talking or lose it totally.
No one answered. I looked at Doreen. She didn’t seem thrilled . . . or jealous. She seemed uncomfortable. “So, Doreen, you’re all happy to be marrying Jeff?”
“Um, yeah,” she said looking down.
“You’re about, what, Lorraine’s age?”
“Yeah.” Eyes still downcast, whole body cringing. Barbara nudged her. “Twenty-three.”
“Wow. Seven years younger than Jeff. Not that age is an issue.”
“No.” Doreen moved away from her mother and closer to Lorraine, who looked straight at me and gave me a very tiny nod. I loved my girls.
“So, Doreen—your parents really hate the fact you’re dating a human, don’t they?”
Immediate reactions. Other than Lorraine and Claudia, who were giving me “go girl” signs, every single woman looked at me with their mouths open and eyes wide. Except Doreen, who burst into tears. “I don’t want to marry Jeff! He barely knows me, and I don’t want to live in the desert! And I don’t want to leave Irving! He’s the nicest man in the world!”
Irving? No argument from me. My dad’s name was Solomon, after all. “No worries, Doreen.”
She looked at me, tears streaming down. “They won’t let us get married! Irving’s done everything he was supposed to—he even converted to our religion. But they say he’s not right for me.”
“Yeah, they really hate me.” I looked at Lucinda and Barbara. “You chicks are real pieces of work, you know that? What year do you think this is, eighteen-fifty? And what country, Russia? My great-grandparents had arranged marriages, but they’re all dead now. My grandparents had it suggested to them. They said, ‘No, thank you.’ ”
I looked at Alfred, who contrived to look shocked. “You know, crap like this makes Jeff sick, literally. It affects him physically, mentally, emotionally.” I looked back at Lucinda. “No wonder he doesn’t think you care about him or Christopher. The worst thing ever to happen to them was Terry dying, in more ways than one.”
I spun around and left the kitchen, hoping I was headed back to the family room. I wasn’t halfway there when someone was next to me. Doreen, of all people. She grabbed my arm. “Help me, please help me.”
Lorraine and Claudia were with us now. “That’s it,” Claudia said, and she was furious. “I’ve had it. If they think they can do this to Jeff, then they think they can do this to all of us.”
“Will the rest of your generation really do what the older A-Cs tell you?”
“We have to. We all swore to obey the Pontifex’s rules.” Claudia was shaking, she was so angry. “They made us promise before we realized it meant we’d have to marry whoever they said.”
“Why don’t you break those promises? Why doesn’t anyone rebel?” I mean, it wasn’t the olden days.
They all looked at me with a sort of horror in their expressions. Okay, this was a biggie. “We promised,” Lorraine said slowly. “We . . . can’t just break those promises.”
Claudia and Doreen both nodded. “We’d be excommunicated,” Doreen said. She sounded as though this was the worst thing in the world. Okay, for the A-Cs, it was the olden days. “We also have nowhere t
o go.” She swallowed. “But I don’t care anymore.”
“We have to find a way out,” Lorraine agreed. “All of us.”
I thought about what my mother had warned me about and the biggest reason I wasn’t pushing for Martini to leave—medical. “Can enough of your generation do medical work?”
Lorraine nodded. “Almost all of us, women, anyway. And we can train anyone who can’t.”
“How many are at the point Doreen is, where they just don’t care about breaking that promise any more?”
Lorraine and Claudia looked at each other. “Probably everyone,” Lorraine said finally, though she didn’t sound confident. “There’s been a lot of . . . talk about what you just said, Kitty. That we should maybe think about breaking a promise that we gave before we understood all the ramifications.”
“If I could get the Pontifex to say that no one would be excommunicated, would that change things?”
“Absolutely,” Claudia said. The others nodded. “If you can get that confirmed, everyone would break that stupid
‘only marry within the A-C race’ promise, or at least everyone who wants to marry a human would.”
“Good. Then we get out. It’s called total rebellion. We find someplace where we can all live, like Dulce, only ours, and we go there. With our mates, whatever race they may be. And, if we have A-Cs who want to support this even if they don’t want to do it themselves, them, too.”
“We do,” Lorraine said firmly.
“And we do it now.”
“I’m in,” Claudia and Lorraine said in unison.
“Me, too,” Doreen said. “And all my friends are in, too.”
“It’ll be better for both races, in the long and short run. Are you sure you can detach from your parents, though?”
“I can’t wait to get away from them,” Doreen spat out. “They don’t care about what I feel or what I want. It’s all ‘good of the race’ and ‘you have to.’ Never any thought about what might be good for me.”
I’d known the younger A-Cs were angry, but I hadn’t realized they were already past furious and living in Rage Central. Fury was useful, but I didn’t want the A-C community fighting itself. There were too many other factions trying to wipe them out.
Before I could say anything, Lucinda and Alfred joined us. “I’m not marrying Jeff!” Doreen shouted, loudly enough to be heard in the family room, I was pretty sure. She moved behind me. I realized she was afraid they were going to try to drag her off somewhere.
“This is ridiculous.” I took a deep breath. “Kevin!”
The men must have been listening in, not that it would have been hard to miss. Kevin ran to me. “What’s up?”
“Kevin, please contact the head of the Presidential Terrorism Control Unit. Ask her to advise the President that we have political refugees. I’m not sure how many, could be hundreds, might be thousands. They’re asking for protection from the United States Government due to religious persecution.”
Kevin pulled his phone out. “On it.”
“Stop.” Lucinda’s voice was quiet. Kevin didn’t stop dialing. “No, don’t do this.”
I got right up into her face. “You want to go head-to-head with me? No problem. I stared down your murderous father and his fugly alter ego. And I helped kill them. Without a moment’s remorse. I killed that bitch Beverly who was torturing and attempting to murder Jeff. And I have more remorse about using her head as a softball—and I have no remorse for that—than I do about pissing you the hell off. You pose no terrors for me. You currently also represent the kind of bigotry and repression my family’s spent their entire lives trying to stop.”
I took another deep breath. “Christopher!”
“Yeah, Kitty.” He was next to Kevin.
“Call your father. Tell him that unless he puts a stop to any form of forced arranged marriage and excommunicating anyone who goes against that edict, I’m going to become a worse threat than Club 51 and all the Super Fuglies combined.”
“You got it.” Christopher started dialing.
“Christopher! How can you do this?” Barbara had joined the party. At this rate, the hallway was going to be a total fire hazard.
He shrugged. “I know who’s next on the forced-marriage rolls.”
Kevin put his hand over the phone. “Kitty, your mother wants to know if she needs to provide military guard to get the refugees out, or if you’d rather just have Caliente Base annexed as their refugee station and send them there.”
“Kitty,” Christopher said before I could answer, “my father says he has no knowledge of any kind of forced marriages in any part of our community. The Pontifex’s office officially does not authorize or sanction this kind of behavior. If, however, you feel the U.S. military needs to be involved for the safety of some or all of our people, he gives you full authorization, and there will be no excommunication of anyone for any reason related to this.” He looked over at Lucinda. “Oh, yes, he also said you’re acting far too much like your father, and you need to cut it out right now.”
Lucinda had the grace to look embarrassed. Barbara, however, seemed dead set on making what I assumed was considered a great marriage for her daughter. “Nonsense. These are our traditions. Tell the Pontifex that we have made and accepted declarations on behalf of Jeffrey and Doreen.”
“Barbie, babe? You really have a lot of chutzpah, I’ll give you that. However, it’s sadly misplaced. You say one more thing I don’t like, and I’ll put every threat I’ve made and all the ones I haven’t in action. Trust me—you can’t take me, and you sure as hell can’t take my mother.”
Barbara’s eyes narrowed. “You have no right to speak to me, in any manner, let alone this one.”
“Sure she does.” Martini’s voice came from behind me. I turned to see him at the back of the group, leaning up against the wall. He looked amused. “See, the hilarious thing is, Kitty outranks every single person in this house, hell, in our community, other than me and Christopher. So, what you’re doing is called insubordination. As I recall, our traditions have a lot to say about that, all of it nasty.”
“That’s by declaration and decision of the Pontifex,” Christopher added. “My dad’s waiting, Kitty. What do you want to do?”
I looked at Kevin. “Annex Caliente Base.”
CHAPTER 50
THE BEDLAM STARTED. I was surprised. I’d gotten used to A-Cs thinking with their mouths shut. Then I realized none of them were thinking so much as freaking.
“SHUT UP!” Martini bellowed, and the windows shook. No one could bellow like he could. The room went still. “Gee, thanks. Now . . . I think we can all handle this nicely. Barbara, I’ll marry your daughter when hell freezes over, no offense meant to you, Doreen.”
“None taken,” she said. She was still hiding behind me. I hadn’t realized I presented such a protective figure. Then again, maybe they had guns and she was merely using me as a body shield.
“Now, Mom, while this has just been the most fun home-coming ever, I’ll give you a choice. You can apologize to Kitty—and by apologize I mean generally abase yourself and grovel, beg, and plead for her to forgive you—and we can all eat that meat loaf I still don’t want, or you can continue this ridiculous gambit, and we can all leave. Oh, and if we leave? I’m never, ever coming back. You can be at death’s door, and you’ll never see me again. For all I know, that’s what you want. In which case, happy to be going now.”
Christopher went and stood next to Martini. “Not that it matters, but that goes for me, too.”
I looked at Lucinda; she looked like she was going to lose it. Alfred had his arm around her. “Boys, that’s a bit extreme.”
“No, it’s not. You don’t get it, do you? They’re all leaving. All of them. All your children, and I promise you, all their children, too. You want to see how it’ll play out? Take a look at some history books and see what the American Immigrant experience was like. Those who came over held onto the old ways, but their children, and especially t
heir children’s children, rebelled and took on American ways.”
“But we’re different,” Lucinda said quietly.
“No, actually, you’re not. Not in the ways that matter.” I looked around for Gower. He was near Martini. “Paul, what does ACE think?”
Gower shook his head. “I’ll let him answer.” He twitched. “ACE is confused why anyone would not want Kitty. Kitty saved world, saved ACE, saved everyone at the Space Center. Jeff loves Kitty, why is that wrong?”
“I’m a human and they’re A-Cs, ACE.”
Gower’s head shook. “Not so different. Come from same origins.” There were gasps in the room.
I looked at Martini. “I knew it. ACE, our common ancestors, were they the Ancients?”
Gower shook his head again. “No. But helped. Helped evolutions.”
“Yeah. We can breed pretty true, so there has to be something back there. Basic genetic theory.” I turned back to Martini’s parents. “So, it’s a simple decision. Are we in or out? Because I’m freaking starving, and either I get some goddamned meat loaf or at least a roll, or I start eating small children, of which, thankfully, you have a large supply.”
I felt a tug at my leg. One of the littler kids was standing there. “You’re funny,” she said with a giggle. “Are you really gonna eat one of us?”
“Yep.” I picked her up and made loud eating sounds near her neck. She squealed with laughter. I looked at Lucinda. “Seriously. Make a decision. She’s awful tender.”
Barbara snarled. “I say, get out.”
Lucinda looked at her. “I beg your pardon? This is my house, and you are a guest in it. As such, you don’t tell my son or any other guests what to do.”
“I’m his future mother-in-law,” Barbara argued.
“Bet me.”
I saw it coming. Barbara lost it and lunged for me. I had a kid in my arms, but kung fu trained you for many things, and I already had her on my hip. I shoved Doreen to the side, leaped out of the way, and gave the back of Barbara’s neck a really vicious chop with the side of my hand. She went facedown on the floor and stayed there.