Page 27 of Breed

Someone.

Until this very point, I had no idea I knew what Captain Sullivan smelled like, but in a house of aliens, the smell of a human is a tangible thing. I become a bloodhound, following that scent. I go upstairs, tucking myself into a little alcove as one of the servants passes.

He glances over toward me, but he doesn’t stop.

“Filthy human scent all over the house,” he grunts.

I scoot out from my hiding spot and keep going up. It makes sense they’d put Sullivan at the top of the house. Traditionally, princesses are kept in a tower. Sullivan is a natural-born princess as far as I am concerned. She’s gorgeous and charismatic, and she has been taken by the saurian equivalent of a king. This place is like a palace, now I think about it.

It’s not a good idea to let your mind drift when you’re in enemy territory, but it is good to get a sense of your surroundings and the narrative around them. In this world, humans are fast becoming a kind of status symbol. We could become a currency if we’re not careful.

I hear something. Soft tones. A sort of humming. It has to be her.

I open the door to the room where the sound is coming from, and see a figure silhouetted in a window. A wave of relief washes over me as I catch sight of Sullivan’s shock of curling blonde hair and the profile of her intelligent, I’d even say wicked, face. She is wearing a very pretty dress and looking out the window of the room with an expression on her face that would best be described as winsome.

In this moment, every memory I ever gathered under her command comes rushing back…

Years ago…

“She’s another mouth to feed, and she’s useless.”

I am shivering and holding what is left of my worldly possessions in a garbage bag. There is dried blood across the left side of my face. Some of it is mine. Some of it belonged to my father. I am the last of my family, the only survivor of a massacre carried out by the man with the shiny boots.

The voice sounds a lot like my father’s, but it is not my father’s. My father will never speak again. This is his brother, and he is speaking in harsh tones of rejection. He hasn’t come out of the house, but I can see his shadow falling over my aunt. She is a diminutive woman, but she has a heart of gold.

I have come here, because it is the only place I know how to get to. It took me hours to arrive. I crawled out through the red, and I got it all over me. I wanted to wash it off, but I wanted to get out of the house more. I keep blinking every time the memory of what I saw when I came out from under the table comes to mind. The blinks make the thoughts go away for a moment. They come back, but I can blink them away.

“Please, Myron. She’s got nowhere else to go.”

“She’s my useless brother’s useless child, and I’ll not have her here. She’ll bring the authorities down on us. She has his rebel blood.”

“She’s family, Myron. We take care of family. What will the church think if we turn the waif away?”

The appeal to family does not do anything, but the threat of social shame does. My uncle cares very, very much about what people think about him. It is part of the reason he doesn’t want me here at all. My uncle is a very rich man. The house I am shivering outside has ten bathrooms and a lot more bedrooms. I have two cousins, sweet blonde children several years younger than me. I can see them peering out the window, their round faces excited at first, but now they hold fear and confusion as the exterior firelight from the lamp my aunt is holding flickers across my bruised face.

My uncle’s response takes a long, freezing moment. My teeth are chattering. I am more frightened than I have ever been in my life. I am starting to understand things no child should have to understand.

“She can sleep in the barn. I don’t want to see her face. She looks like him, and he got what he deserved.”

“I’ll make you up a bed,” my aunt says.

I go to sleep that night sleeping in straw and covered in my parents' blood. It is the first bad night of a hundred bad nights, the beginning of a nightmare that does not end. Having lost the protection of my family, and being at the mercy of my uncle’s wrath, not to mention the bullying attentions of his daughters, my cousins, my world becomes very small and very dark.

I am left in no doubt as to my many deficiencies. I know that I am wrong, that I came from wrong, and that I will only ever do wrong.

Adecade later, I find myself on a space station. I don’t know the name of it. It’s just a string of letters and numbers that don’t mean anything to me. I’m also drunk, and high, and hungry, which is a weird combination.

Ripped fishnets and a skirt that covers practically nothing along with a tube top are all I am wearing. It’s what the men like. The men like to look, but they like to touch more. They grab at me without my permission. They think because they want me, I must want them. I don’t remember ever wanting a man in my life. The touch of men repulses me. There’s a hunger in it, a kind of filthy desperation that turns me from a thinking woman with some innocence left in me, to a piece of meat made for them to plunge themselves inside.

“Hey, little lady,” one of the station rats says. Station rats are guys who come through these places with loads for colonies. They don’t do anything really. Their ships pretty much fly themselves, but they collect enough currency to get by sitting in the pilot’s seat and occasionally steering around a solar storm or two. This one has long, greasy hair, and is old enough to be my father. He’s got a graying mustache that droops along with the rest of his facial features. He’s not appealing in any sense. He smells like sour milk and alcohol.

“Yeah?” I look at him, trying not to let my instant loathing show on my face.

“You want to earn some currency?”

“Come with me,” I say.

If I weren’t a pretty young girl, he’d be suspicious about following me, but as it is, he follows me back to the stinking alley between the bar and the repair shop like a horny lamb. He thinks I’m about to fuck him at best and suck him at worst.

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