The Spawning (35 page)

Miranda didn’t even realize that was his intent at first. She was disconcerted at the thought that he meant to make love to her in Adar’s bed, even though Adar didn’t seem disturbed by it. When she’d lain down, though, and Teron picked up her hand and examined, it dawned on her that he’d come as ‘the healer’.

Uneasiness instantly swept through her. She hadn’t given a thought to the

possibility, the likelihood, that she wasn’t pregnant and that the men thought she was since the first week she’d spent in the village. It crashed over her with an unpleasant shock, though, when Teron, after examining her hands and feet, began to carefully press her abdomen.

He pulled her gown down again and offered his hand to help her sit up. “We will need to return you and the others to the compound,” he said without preliminary.

The shock that went through Miranda that time left her cold. “Why?”

He frowned, lifting a hand to lightly stroke her cheek. “You are not … fashioned for this environment, Miranda. Even limiting the time that you spend in the water, your skin is damaged and you do not have the ability to pull air into your body and hold it for long periods of time as we do. You aren’t designed in that way. It places a strain upon THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 156

you that you should not have when you are breeding—even so early as this.”

She wanted to argue the matter, but she didn’t dare suggest that she might not be pregnant at all. “It’s still better here,” she said after a moment. “The sun damages my skin in the compound and … I don’t have to go to the nursery every day. I could stay in the pod and go once in a while and it wouldn’t be as bad.”

“The Vernamin have delivered the temporary shelters we traded for. The

compound will be better for you.”

Miranda clamped her lips against arguing any further. It seemed obvious, since they’d gotten temporary shelters, that they’d never intended to keep her with them any of the time. Arguing was patently useless when they clearly hadn’t changed their mind about it since then. It would only add strain to a relationship that was evidently tenuous at best.

She looked away, trying to gather her pride around her like a shield, trying to hide the hurt tightening in her chest until she could barely breathe. “When will I be taken back?”

“Tomorrow.”

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 157

Chapter Eighteen

It was just as well, Miranda thought wryly, that the return trip to the compound was such a traumatic and exhausting experience for all of them. She was pretty sure emotion would’ve overruled common sense otherwise and there would’ve been some very ugly scenes on the beach. A good half of the women still managed to show their asses, though in most of those cases it was a matter of stalking off sullenly or weeping.

Only a handful were able to really work at burning their bridges, and of course Carol was the leader of the pack as usual.

Trying to ignore her screaming tirade, Miranda managed to gather her wits

enough, and hold tightly enough to her conflicting emotions to kiss Khan and tell him she hoped she’d see him again soon.

She waited until all of the men had left the beach and disappeared before she

confronted Carol and her group of harpies, releasing her own pent up emotions. “You total,
stupid,
fucking moron!” she snarled, struggling with the urge to knock the woman off her feet. “We need them a hell of a lot more than they need us! And you can be damned sure if you’ve succeeded in running them off for good that I won’t lift a hand to feed your stupid, sorry ass! If you can’t be anything besides fucking useless, at least learn to keep your damned mouth shut or, honest to god, I’m going to beat you

unconscious until I teach you better!”

It was fortunate, for Carol, that she was so shocked that she didn’t come back with some of the mouthy comments she generally did. Miranda wasn’t certain she could’ve contained her urge toward violence if Carol had added to her stupidity by provoking her.

When she saw that she’d cowed the group, she turned on her heel and stalked

toward the hut, ignoring the domed habitats that had been lined up along the far back wall of the compound. Dropping onto the crackling and now brittle grasses of what had been her pallet, she covered her face with her hands and wept until she was exhausted.

She didn’t realize she’d been followed until Deborah sat down next to her and

wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Mopping her wet face with her hands, she wiped her hands on her gown and finally glanced at Deborah. Stacy, Mary Jane, Jan, and Beth, she discovered, had followed her into the hut. They were red eyed, as well, their eyes puffy enough she thought they’d probably spent the night before indulging their own emotions.

“You think they’ll come back?” Deborah finally asked, her voice a little hoarse with the mixture of fear and grief threading it.

Miranda sniffed. “I don’t think they’ve abandoned us—not completely,

anyway—unless those
bitches
managed to give them all a complete disgust of us.

They’re not just too stupid to live. They’re dangerous. You’d think anyone, short of a purely retarded person, would have enough sense not to run the Hirachi off completely!”

The other women looked at each other uncomfortably. “You think we should

have a meeting?” Stacy asked finally. “There’s four habitats. We’re going to have to THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 158

decide who sleeps where if nothing else.”

Miranda didn’t particularly feel like conducting a meeting, not if they expected her to do the talking, but she realized there was no point in putting it off any longer.

They had a faction of women among them that were a burden in too many ways to count.

It couldn’t be ignored or tolerated anymore. For better or worse, they were stuck with one another. She supposed, all things considered, that they could’ve been much worse off. At least the majority of the women realized their lives depended upon their willingness to work and to tackle tasks they’d never been called upon to do before.

Nodding tiredly, she told the others that she’d meet up with them after she’d

washed her face. She left the hut, moving down to the water. The women didn’t have to be gathered. They’d already headed to the habitats to check them out, but once she’d checked them out herself, the group gathered outside.

Her anger had surfaced again by the time she faced them because Carol and her

cronies had already looked the habitats over and picked the choice spots for themselves.

Not that there was a huge difference from one to the other—in fact none—but the habitats contained stacked bunks and the prima donnas had all perched their little asses on the lower bunks.

They didn’t bother to join the rest of the group who gathered to hear what was going on. After waiting a few minutes to give them time to present themselves, Miranda marched to the women seated. “You, you, you, and you,” she said tightly, tapping each on the shoulder. “Bring Carol’s ass out here.” Without waiting to see if they’d do it, she tapped four more women and sent them after Lynn and so on.

She hadn’t reckoned on just how resentful the women had become. By the time

the ‘culprits’ had been dragged out kicking and screaming, everyone was showing signs of a fight and struggling to subdue the urge to wreak more havoc on the women they’d been ‘deputized’ to retrieve.

The offenders were dumped unceremoniously at the front of the group. Miranda

made sure that she made eye contact with each one. “I’m going to say this one more time for the mentally impaired among us—
this
is survival. It isn’t a game and it isn’t a popularity contest where you
might
be elected queen of the day. None of us care how fucking adorable you are in the old world. Here, you’re just a another mouth to feed and you’ve been nothing but a burden since you arrived. Not only that, but you’ve done the best you could to create trouble among us, and between us and the Hirachi—who we depend on for survival. From now one, you
will
work just like everybody else, or you don’t eat. Sit on your ass, pretend you’re too stupid and/or weak to do the work assigned, and you can starve to death for all we care. If I find out you’re playing the Hirachi men against each other to stroke your fucking ego, if I see you throw another fit in front of those men, I
will
form a lynching party, we
will
march the offender off into the jungle and we
will
leave you there!

“You are not
worth
my life! You are not worth risking the lives of
any
of the other women here. Is that perfectly clear? Because I can break it down into baby talk if you still haven’t grasped your situation.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Carol the truly stupid snarled.

Miranda crouched in front of her. “You don’t want to test that. You obviously haven’t grasped that most of the women here, including me, would just as soon take your ass off right now and be rid of you. This is your last chance.”

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 159

“My men would be furious!”

“Assuming you haven’t completely cured them of any interest in you already, we can play stupid just as well as you can. We can tell them anything we want to explain your absence, my dear.

“And then we could divide your men up among us and treat them like they

deserve. What they
don’t
deserve when they’ve broken their backs to take care of all of us is to be treated like shit.”

Carol began to look worried for the first time. “You think my friends won’t tell them?”

Miranda looked her ‘friends’ over before focusing on Carol again. “I
think
taking you off and dumping you might be the incentive they need to behave themselves. I
think
they aren’t your friends. I
think
they wouldn’t risk a broken fingernail, anymore than you would, to help anybody but themselves … because they’re just like you, Carol.”

Leaving her message to sink in, she stood again and faced the other women.

“We’re going to hope the Hirachi haven’t abandoned us. Teron said they’d brought us back because they knew the sea wasn’t our natural environment and it wasn’t good for us. I don’t think he was just saying that—although I’m sure it wasn’t easy sharing their personal space when they clearly aren’t used to it, particularly with people that aren’t even of their culture.

“They’ve shown more thoughtfulness and care than we probably deserve since we

haven’t really been able to be that useful to them and I think we should try to focus on that and not hurt feelings. We’ll divide the undesirables between the habitats because they’ll have to be watched, but, within reason, I don’t see why we can’t split up according to preferences for roommates. It should make living together a lot easier and then, once we’ve done that, the groups need to draw straws or something to settle who gets the bottom bunk—unless some of you don’t mind the top anyway.

“One thing—personal belongings belong to the person who’s managed to

accumulate them. Nobody ‘borrows’ unless they’ve been given permission. Otherwise it’s going to be considered stealing and we’ll have to vote on punishment.

“Stealing will not be tolerated!

“If anybody has ‘borrowed’ something that doesn’t belong to them, now is the

time to return it with apologies to the injured party. Once everybody has been settled in to their new area, rest a little, and then we’ll meet up again and decide what needs to be done, prioritize, and split up if we have to to get it done.”

Deborah eyed her with a mixture of amusement and respect when she joined the

women she’d come to think of as friends. “I don’t know if I want to live with you or not,” she murmured. “Ohh, you’re scary when you’re pissed!”

Miranda gave her a look. “You should talk! I saw you punch Carol in the mouth!

I didn’t punch anybody.”

Deborah shrugged, looked away guiltily. “It felt better than it should have. I didn’t know I had it in me, but to be honest I wanted to hit her a few more times once I got started.” She was silent for a moment. “Did you really mean that about getting rid of Carol and the others?”

Miranda shook her head. “I hope it won’t come to that.”

“But if it did?”

Miranda studied Stacy for a moment. “I’m not willing to die for her stupidity. I THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 160

meant that. If she and the others continue to behave in such a way that they are a threat to the survival of the majority, we won’t have any choice—but it’ll be their decision, not ours.”

They discovered when they went to claim a habitat that they’d been stuck with

Carol and Joy. Miranda instantly regretted the decision to divide up the troublesome pack, but she knew it was for the best, even though she hated having to put up with Carol and Joy. Everybody else had at least two women in their midst that they would’ve rather not been around.

Having settled the question of the bunks, she left the habitat, returning to the hut to collect her gifts. She felt like crying when she discovered Khan—or someone—had returned to collect her pants and boots for her as she’d asked, cleaned them and neatly folded them, and then placed them with her other things. They hadn’t said anything about it and she hadn’t wanted to pester them. She’d given up hope that she would ever see the pants and boots again, though, or figured even if she did she’d find out they were completely ruined.

Deborah, Mary Jane, and Stacy joined her in the hut. Mary Jane sniffed her

things and wrinkled her nose. “Smoked. I suppose they’ll smell like smoke forever more. It’s a shame we didn’t think to drag some of the meat in and smoke it while we were at it.”

Miranda looked at her with a surge of excitement. “You know how to smoke

meat? Doesn’t that make it keep longer without going bad?”

Mary Jane shrugged. “Not really, I don’t guess. Dad had a smoker and used to smoke turkeys for Christmas. I don’t know if it would, like, make it keep a lot longer, but all he did was build a fire in the smoker and leave the turkey to slowly cook. It took hours and hours. I remember that.”