Chapter Five
Fern
They came to my door, an hour before the bridal choosing ceremony. The autolocks clicked right open for them. Two human men and one gargoyle.
I knew resistance was futile, but I wasn’t going without a fight.
So when I’m dumped unceremoniously into a cell at the Beech Bluff Government Garrison, I’m covered in bruises and my lip is bloodied. I touch it gingerly as I grin.
At least I got a message to Nann in time.
She’d shown up just as the guards got there and powered her way in, under the guise of being a wise woman.
She is one, after all. She told them I’d been poorly the last week and she had another dose of medicine to give me.
A quick shot in the arm. Her eyes dimmed sadly and she hugged me before slipping out without another word.
I’d also given those human fucking traitors something to think on in the form of pain. It was the damn statue that had eventually taken me down. He wrestled me to the floor, yanking the kitchen knife from my hand, letting his stone cock rub against me lecherously. Fucker.
I smirk again though. I have a calf sheath under my skirts, my short sword firmly in it. I’m hoping I might get to place it firmly into some fucking goyle here soon.
It’s dim in here and I can hear the other women. Some are crying softly, but most are silent. Probably asking themselves why the fuck they didn’t flee when they had the chance.
I know I am.
But, honestly, I know why I stayed. I stayed for retribution. For stubbornness. For my home.
Most women probably stayed because the odds of being one of the one hundred women chosen once a year in a lottery seemed mathematically unlikely. Especially since only sixty-seven of them needed to come from New United, the rest spread among the other largest nations of the world.
I hear a rumble and realize that a huge door, like a garage door, is opening. Dim, filtered evening light floods in.
Surrounded by various shades of grey goyles, the human women from the other nations walk into our holding room. The goyles quickly shuffle them into cells, made with some futuristic polymer that is transparent, leaving us in clear view.
Given that I live near the facility, I seem to be one of the last women shoved in here, beside the foreigners. I stand, wiping my face and cross my arms under my breasts.
“Hey!” I call angrily. “We’re not animals!”
A guard laughs, “Some of you certainly are. I saw what a mess you made of Thomas, little kitty.”
I snarl. He steps forward, wings spread out behind him. Classic animal behavior: make himself bigger to seem more dangerous.
“Your dick is too small to fucking scare me, you damn bat.”
He slams his baton against the clear material. Unfortunately for me, I jump.
The guard chuckles meanly. “You’ll be stuffed full soon enough, I don’t doubt it.”
The woman next to me meets my eye and shakes her head lightly, obviously telling me to shut the hell up. For once, I listen; sitting on the bare floor and watching the guards.
They are walking up and down the aisles of cages, attaching a flat touch screen to the outside of each cell.
“What the hell are those?” I bark at a different goyle.
Anger is good. Anger is better than tears.
Anger got me through the years after Mom and Pa’s death.
The years when I had to run our house, and take up the spaces they left in the resistance.
I’ve never been more thankful to be an only child; I couldn’t have managed trying to support another person through the exhausting nightmare I slogged through, solely on fury.
The guard ignores me but I yell again, “Where are the women who are to be released? Last year’s women?”
No one answers.
I’ll get through this too, dammit. If having lost everything important to me didn’t kill me, some goyle dick certainly wasn’t going to.