Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 68525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
But… I thought. But…
Despite everything—despite the history of my world and the excellent company-sponsored education, despite my parents’ quiet acknowledgment of my fate, despite the whispers of the other girls—I had possessed a shred of consolation for the past four moons, as the rumors of current events in the heart of the empire had reached Kamnos.
I chewed on my lower lip, considering, wondering whether it would do the slightest bit of good to tell Elder Harta and Elder Jusalon why I had hoped I might avoid requisition.
Elder Jusalon apparently knew what I was thinking, though. He said, in a weary voice, “The war hasn’t changed anything, Chalondra, I’m afraid. In fact, it’s made the company more demanding. The navy needs Kamnian girls for the officers in the front-line systems. This requisition involves thirty-six young women from Kamnos, one from each village.”
My eyes went round, and I looked up into his face to see that the elder’s expression had turned grim.
He shook his head, clearly reading my mind again. “As you can imagine, I don’t have any way of knowing where they’ll take you. I would guess the company agent doesn’t know himself.”
I swallowed hard. The Imperial Navy? To my dismay, a perverse thrill of excitement surged in my chest. Our early school lessons had involved a healthy dose of adventure-tales, many of them centered on the dashing exploits of admirals, captains, commodores, and even common enlisted star-sailors, who of course earned promotion at least to lieutenant by the end of the story. On Kamnos, the thick clouds of the atmosphere meant that we never saw the stars at all: for as long as I could remember, I had longed not just to see them but to go out into them, travel there like the heroes and heroines of the stories.
“May I…?” I started to ask, as I felt the color come and go in my cheeks.
“Yes, of course,” said Elder Harta. “Go in and say goodbye to your sisters and your mother. Don’t be long, please.”
I felt my forehead crease hard. Tears welled up in my eyes and I blinked, looking down again at the soil, at my bare feet. The idea that I should feel outrage over the injustice of it occurred to me, as a sort of exercise in metaphysics, rather than anything I truly felt on the inside. Here, I suddenly realized, lay part of the genius of the Tri-System way of doing business.
All Kamnian adolescents had to take a course called “Galactic Ethics” in their final year of school. In that course, our teacher Mrs. Grelinqua—a Kamnian woman who had passed the legendarily difficult engineering qualifying exam and traveled within the empire—had repeatedly raised the question of whether the company treated Kamnos fairly. We had spent weeks debating the issue on a theoretical level, surrounded by all the benefits the company bestowed on our world. Our teacher had ended the course with what amounted to a shrug, though: why did it matter, she had asked us, if it was fair, when it was simply the way the company chose to operate?
I turned and walked into the house, remembering as I did so that my father had held me especially close that morning before he went out to work. I felt my cheeks warm once again as I realized what it must have meant: the elders had told him what would befall me today. He had been saying goodbye.
Part of me wanted to fling that in the face of my mother, but when I saw that face, and realized that she, too, knew exactly why I had come back in from the garden, all I could do was let myself be swallowed up in her arms one final time, while my sisters joined in for a tearful group hug.
“Don’t let them take your spirit,” my mother whispered into my ear. “Whatever they do.”
As I detached myself from my family’s arms and turned to walk out of my home, I thought about those old school reports that had never failed to call me high-spirited, with the clear intention of delivering a warning, not to let my high spirits turn into misbehavior. My parents’ tendency to spoil me slightly had probably contributed to my low-level naughtiness, growing up, but my mother had always accompanied her mild punishments with words like, “Your free spirit is a wonderful thing, Chalondra, but you must not let it get out of hand.”
I followed the elders in silence the short distance to the village house, still thinking about it. If I truly had a free spirit, shouldn’t I be trying to run off into the woods, doing something drastic—trying to start a rebellion on Kamnos that might find some way to communicate with the Magisterians and help their effort against the empire?
Insanity, I thought, again. Lunacy and spirit are not the same thing. Doing something foolish can’t be the only way to keep some shred of freedom in the face of a system designed to turn a young woman into property.