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I turned and brought the buckets down the stairs, emptying them into sterile bottles. The whole time, I thought about her. Thought about her coming down here, like some little creature of the woods, foraging for her dinner.
And for mine.
I could not remember the last time someone had put together a meal for me, even a simple one like the ones on the plates above. My old warden before Tenn probably had when I’d first arrived. My mother must have before that, though my memories of her were hazy at best and bloodstained at worst.
But Cherry made me dinner.
My wife made me dinner.
Something like hunger burned in my belly, but I did not think it was for the food.
I headed back up the stairs to find Cherry in the same place. She had not yet touched her food.
Waiting for me.
The burn in my belly moved upward, warming my chest. I tried to cough it out. It did not work.
“I wasn’t sure where to put this stuff since there’s no table or chairs. But I don’t mind eating Silar-style tonight,” she said. “You’ll have to tell me what some of this stuff is. I assumed all of it was edible.”
“Smoked meat,” I said, aiming a claw at her plate. “Pickled root vegetables. Pickled ardu eggs. Pickled ardu eyes.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of pickled… Hold on. Did you say eyes?” Her own eyes got huge in the dusky gloom. “Well… Alright! Who am I to turn my nose up at that?”
Could humans move their noses?
She popped a shiny ardu eyeball into her mouth. I watched her chew, aware that my gaze was whitening and not having a single way to stop it. I watched the muscles work along her delicate jaw, suddenly desperate to place my fingertips there and feel her.
I did not. I shoved some meat into my mouth and chewed.
“Not bad, actually,” Cherry said after swallowing. “What kind of meat is this? Is this from the herd outside? What are those animals called?”
“The cattle?”
“Oh, it’s just translating to ‘cattle.’ I guess that’s the equivalent, then.”
“The individual beasts are called bracku. We call the males bulls and the babies are calves.”
“OK, yup. Some of those are translating. So, you obviously can eat them. And I suppose that was milk you brought in. Is that all you use them for?” She ate another ardu eye while peering out the window at the darkening land. “You sure seem to have a lot of them for just you.”
“Once a cycle the Zabrian Empire sends agents to grade them. They buy most of the healthy ones and deposit credits as compensation into an account managed by the warden.”
She tore her gaze from the window and fastened it on me.
“Managed by the warden? What, is he like a financial officer, too? That man sure wears a lot of hats.”
“I’ve only ever seen him wear one hat. Though he may have more,” I told her with some discomfort. I did not know how to lie around this. How best to explain that, as convicts, we were not allowed free rein of our own earnings. That anything we wanted to order from the Empire or from somewhere like Elora Station had to be approved and vetted first.
How could I explain to her that if I ever wanted to buy her a gift, I could not even do it without asking the warden’s permission first?
Not that I’d even know what sort of gift to give her. With a jolt, I realized her scarf was still tied around my ears. I hastened to unfasten it. I tried to hand it back, but she was looking out the window again and did not notice me. I held it awkwardly in the air for a long moment, just watching her and unable for some reason to form a single sound to catch her attention. Eventually, I folded it carefully and put it on the counter.
“They must really like the meat if they’re willing to go to so much work shipping it between planets,” she said, almost more to herself than me.
“Bracku is a delicacy on Zabria, but the animals do not thrive there.”
“But it also doesn’t seem like there are many of you here doing this,” Cherry pointed out. “If it’s worth going to the trouble of coming way out here for the cattle, why don’t they have a big operation set up out here? Just, like, tons of ranches and people working the land? Does this have something to do with the caste system Tasha mentioned?”
My wife was clever and curious and I worried that might prove to be to my detriment. I avoided her gaze.
