Chapter 1
CHLOE
I have been returned more times than a library book.
Twice, technically. But two times on a planet where the men outnumber the women roughly a thousand to one and are so desperate for wives they import us by the shipful from the worst parts of Earth.
Two times in a place where a woman with a pulse and most of her teeth is supposed to be a hot commodity.
You have to work to get sent back here. You have to be genuinely, impressively unkeepable.
I'm a high achiever. Always have been.
"The form does not have a box for 'returned by an idiot,'" Theeodus said, in the tone of a man explaining gravity to a fish.
"That's a design flaw. Jot that down." A cold draft licked across the back of my neck, and I turned in time to catch the office door banging shut behind something enormous. I didn't get a good look. Just a wall of muscle in a hurry to be anywhere I wasn't, which, honestly, mood.
But something strange tugged in my chest when he went. I rubbed the spot.
It had to be heartburn. Space travel wrecks your digestion. Nobody tells you that in the brochure.
The brochure has a lot of nerve, frankly.
It's all glowing fruit and big handsome monsters gazing into the misty distance, and it fails to mention that the gravity's a hair heavy, everything smells like wood smoke and makes your throat scratchy, and that you will spend your first week here reaching for counters built at the exact height of your own collarbone and feeling like a toddler who wandered into a furniture showroom for giants.
"Who's the cheerful one?" I asked and glanced back toward the door.
Theeodus had gone the color of skim milk. He was a thin, pale human in an Agency jumpsuit two sizes too big, and he had the specific haunted look of a man who flinches at horns for a living. "That's Lorkin. He runs the forge. You should not, ah, bother him."
I knew the name the way you know names from someone else's stories. Maisie had mentioned him on our calls, fond and a little wary. He was the town's blacksmith. Near as I could tell, he was the closest thing Kazan had to a brother. I'd never put a face to him.
Technically, I still hadn't, I guessed. I’d only seen his shoulders.
"I wasn't going to bother him." I absolutely had been going to bother him. Bothering large men is a core part of my personality, right behind 'loyal' and 'will say the thing everyone's thinking at the worst possible moment.' "I was going to admire him from a respectful distance."
"He's not… " Theeodus lowered his voice as if the soot-stained mountain might still be listening through the wall. "He has no wish for a bride. The mayor put him forward. Most of the men are glad to come. Lorkin has been avoiding our summons for weeks."
The back door opened before Theeodus could say anything more, and Nezara came out with my paperwork in one hand.
I liked Nezara, which made it worse, because what she said next made me want to climb out the window.
She was the only minotaur woman I'd met, dusky gold with her horns jutting out and an expression like she'd watched the universe try its best and come up short, and she talked to spooked people the exact way you'd talk to a nervous horse.
Slow. Even. Hands where you could see them.
She'd had to use that voice on me twice now. You'd think I'd resent it by now.
"Chloe," she said. "Sit, if you like."
"I'll stand. Lay it on me."
She didn't soften it, which I appreciated, because the soft version is always worse.
"This is your third placement. By the Agency's terms, it is your last. If this trial period ends in a return, I cannot keep you on the rolls.
The next outbound transport will take you back to Earth, and I will not be able to bring you out again, though the Agency may be able to find a different colony looking for brides. "
If they're desperate. She didn't say that part out loud.
There it was.
I'd known. I'd read the same fine print everybody reads and ignores, but knowing a thing and hearing Nezara say it in that careful, gentled-animal voice with her eyes steady on me were not the same thing.
The floor did the thing floors do. Stayed exactly where it was and somehow dropped out from under me anyway.
"So no pressure," I said.
"There is considerable pressure," Nezara said.
"I would be lying to tell you otherwise.
I'd rather you go in knowing." She set the file down on the counter and squared it with two fingers.
"I will be honest with you. There are not many women who try a third time.
Most give up after the first failure and take the next ship home to some smaller life that fits.
You have failed twice and you are still standing in my office asking me for a third.
That tells me something about you, whether or not you want it told. "
"That I don't take a hint?"
"That you are braver than anyone sees."
I had to look at the filing crates for a second. They were full of hard-copy forms, actual paper, this whole bureaucracy of want, every file a woman who'd run from something and a man who'd lost something, all of it sorted into crates by an Agency trying to make a business out of love.
"You're a terrible cheerleader," I told her when I trusted my voice. "Has anyone told you that? You'd ruin a pep rally."
She let me have the deflection. "Kazan and Maisie are having people out to the orchard tonight. The unmated males will be there. It is as good a place as any to begin a third trial." A beat. "Try to let one of them see you. The real you. Not the act."
That's not what they're looking for.
I bit the thought back before I said it. "I'll do my best," the words were too bright, but it was better than the alternative.
She looked at me for a second too long like she could see under my surface. Then she let it go, which is the kindest thing anybody can do for me, and told me to go find a husband.
Maisie hit me at a dead run.
I've known her since we were nine, and the Maisie I grew up with took up all the room she wanted.
Then four years with that smooth-voiced reptile James crumpled her up like a dirty napkin, made her smaller in every way that didn't show on a measuring tape.
She used to flinch when people moved too fast. She used to apologize to furniture.
The woman who slammed into me outside the Agency office did not apologize to anyone.
She wrapped both arms around my ribs and squeezed like she meant to crack one, warm and solid and glowing, actually faintly glowing, probably from all the star-figs she ate out at the orchard.
She smelled like wood smoke and cider now; the orchard worked all the way into her, a whole year of Ceres-9 where Earth used to be.
"You went in without me," she said into my collarbone, muffled and accusing. "I told you to wait for me."
"It's not news, I read the contract. Third strike, you're out, back to Earth, roll credits." I held on, maybe a little too long, since the alternative was making a face I didn't want her to see. "It was fine."
She pulled back to look at me, hands on my arms, and her smile did the small, complicated thing it had done each time I told her my trial matches were over. She'd always been able to read me. That was the trouble with people who'd known you that long. "You've got this," she said quietly.
"Third time's the charm." I grinned so hard it hurt.
"Chlo."
"Don't." I kept the grin nailed up. "Don't do the voice.
I get enough voice from the cow lady. You know I came to your wedding, Maisie.
Flew across actual space, watched you marry a seven-foot man who looks at you like you invented love, and cried so hard a stranger gave me his pocket square, and on the flight home I thought, screw it. I want that. I'm allowed to want that."
"You are."
"So I signed up. And the first guy was lovely and we had the chemistry of two damp towels, and the second guy I genuinely think was just lonely for someone to listen to him talk about drainage, and I kissed him once out of politeness and we both knew.
Now I'm down to my last swing and if I whiff it they put me on a boat.
" I heard my own voice get faster and brighter, all the words in my throat racing to the finish line.
"It's fine. It's fascinating, actually. I'm a case study. They'll name a syndrome after me."
Maisie didn't laugh. She'd heard the jokes before, once after each trial that ended with me back at the Agency, and she'd stopped finding it funny months ago. She just looked at me with those steady hazel eyes, and she said, "You're a freaking prize. The next minotaur is going to know it."
"Tell that to my permanent record," I said, and looped my arm through hers before she could say anything kind enough to undo me in the street.
We walked. The main street of New Knossos ran wide and rutted, churned to mud where the loggers dragged their sleds, and the buildings hunched along it in heavy dark timber, low-roofed and broad-doored so the bulls could pass without ducking.
Everything was built three sizes too big.
A bench I'd have needed a running start to climb onto, a horse trough, except for something that wasn't a horse, that I could've taken a bath in.
Big flannel-shouldered men nodded to Maisie as we passed, and a couple of them nodded to me too, with the careful, calculating look of bachelors running the numbers on whether the twice-returned human was back in play.
I was choosing to find it flattering rather than grim.
"Okay," I said. "Tell me about the men coming to the orchard tonight. Tall, I assume. Horned, I'm counting on. Walk me through the buffet."
I wasn't looking at her face, but I could practically hear her roll her eyes.
Maisie sighed. "There's a few you've never really looked at," she said.
"Korfas is sweet. Big quiet guy, he listens, you've met him a dozen times and never given him a real shot.
Zarcal's funny, he'll talk your ear off.
Half the unmated males will turn out tonight regardless, fair warning, an available woman in this town is basically a parade, and right now you're the only float.
" She hesitated, and her arm tightened on mine.
"And there's Lorkin, but he doesn't come to things, so don't get your hopes up about the scary blacksmith.
He was at the wedding, but I don't think you met.
He hid in the corner and scowled by the door and was gone before the dancing started.
I doubt you got within ten feet of the man. He never leaves that forge otherwise."
My head turned, before I'd decided to let it, toward the smoke hanging over the far end of the street.
"Scary blacksmith, noted." I said. "And not interested. Couldn't pick him out of a lineup."
I could have picked his shoulders out of a lineup, but that, I decided, was a problem strictly for future Chloe, who would be drunk on fig cider and three excellent prospects deep by sundown, and far better equipped to handle it.
Future Chloe has historically been left holding a great deal of present Chloe's nonsense. She's a saint. She never complains.
She just quietly signs the departure forms when the rest of us lose our nerve.