Page 111 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“You might be surprised!”

“And so might you,” Bodil said dryly.

“This isn’t your fight!” Enid snarled. “It’s ours, and we want a chance!”

“At what?” Alphonse asked.

“The things you already have and take for granted,” she said passionately. “A life we can call our own, a chance to live where we choose, do what we like, and marry by our choice. Do you have any idea—”

She broke off. “No. Of course, you don’t. And those who do, like Rhosier and our betters,” she glanced at Bodil, and it wasn’t friendly. “Want us to accept that this is how things are and will always be. But I, for one, will not accept!”

“We have been getting your people out,” Bodil said, frowning at her.

Enid laughed scornfully. “Oh, yes. A handful at a time. Should I thank you for that?”

“Yes.” It was flat. “I have risked much—”

“You have risked nothing!” Enid was suddenly in her face, making Alphonse start looking worried because Bodil wasn’t someone you wanted to piss off.

But Enid had the bravado of someone who had almost been killed half a dozen times today and had officially reached fuck it. She was telling truth to power, and power had best sit down and listen. Or lose it and kill us all, I thought, exchanging a glance with Alphonse.

“Hey,” he said, but Enid wasn’t listening.

“Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing?” she said fervently. “You serve the system just as much as Feltin and the rest!”

“Be careful,” Bodil warned. “Do not speak my name and his in the same sentence.”

“Or what? Will you have me beaten? Or do even worse? At a word from you, I could vanish, never to be heard from again—”

“If I acted in such a way, which I do not!”

“No. They have enough people to terrify us. You act as a pressure release, like the valves on the cooks’ pots. Shuffle out the troublemakers, the dissidents, the ones willing to fight. Get them to Earth before they cause too much unrest and influence others. Keep the docile ones, let them continue to breed for you, die for you—and raise more just like them. A perpetual slave class to preserve your power—”

“Is that what you think?” Bodil demanded.

“It’s what I know. Rhosier can believe what he likes and tell himself he’s a rebel, so he can channel his rage and not explode when they grind him under their collective heel. But I know the truth—”

“You are an angry child who understands nothing,” Bodil said calmly.

“I understand that your ‘help’ is why we haven’t fought before and continue to suffer this! You who so value children, do you know what it’s like to give birth, to suckle a babe, to see him grow—

“And to watch him go off to war to die for his jailors and yours? Or to watch your daughter be taken by one of those fine lords, to be ‘selected’—what a lucky girl! To be ripped away from her family and—” She stopped with her face crumpling as if she couldn’t go on. “It’s you who doesn’t understand,” she whispered.

I put a hand on her arm because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t understand all that, either, and I was grateful for it. Sometimes, it was easy to resent my life until I met someone like Enid and got some damned perspective.

Enid looked from my hand to my face, and her eyes were flooded but resolute. “I wanted to fight for years but couldn’t,” she told me. “I never had the chance. Everything was the same no matter how much we tried to change it—until you came.”

“I thought you hated her,” Alphonse said.

“I hated her when I thought she was the same as all the rest. But she’s like . . . like that earthquake out there—”

“Which I did,” Bodil said sourly, not appreciating the love fest.

“—and changed everything in an instant! Suddenly, the world looks different!”

“Considering where we are, I wouldn’t say that’s a plus,” Alphonse pointed out, but Enid wasn’t listening.

“Thank you for that,” she said to me, her voice wavering. “No matter what happens . . . thank you for letting me fight!”

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