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“They… God, why is this so much harder than I’d thought!” Cherry cried, throwing up her hands. “I don’t even know where to start. Maybe I’m not even doing the right thing. I didn’t know it about Silar at first and it’s probably better that I didn’t! Otherwise, I might not have given him a chance and I wouldn’t have fallen in love with him!”
Oh, boy.
We were getting nowhere, fast. Whatever it was that Cherry knew, I wanted to know, too. I didn’t give two shiny shits about “giving him a chance” and “falling in love.” I wasn’t here to get all ooey gooey about my alien man. I was going to be practical, damnit!
“Are they… what… sick? Do they have some kind of communicable disease?” I asked, figuring that if Cherry wasn’t going to spit it out, I’d better just start guessing.
She looked stricken, maybe even offended on behalf of her husband.
“No!”
“What, then? Are they mean? Abusive?”
“Absolutely not! At least, definitely not Silar or Fallon!”
I huffed out a frustrated sigh. What the hell else could it be that was so important?
“Is it the sex? Do they have really weird alien dicks or something?”
“Well… I mean…”
For fuck’s sake.
“Cherry!” I said sharply, bringing my hands together in front of her face with a tight clapping sound, making her jump. “I appreciate that all the humming and hawing is coming from a good place and that you love your husband. That’s all just fine and dandy. But Magnolia and I don’t have the same rose-coloured glasses on that you do. We don’t know these men and whatever you know about them, we should know, too.”
“Please, Cherry,” added Magnolia, rubbing at her temples with the tips of her fingers. “I’ve already had too much go wrong today. I can’t handle any more surprises where my fiancé is concerned.”
“Of course. You’re right,” Cherry said quickly, looking pained. “Sorry.”
“So what are they, then?” I asked, still too impatient for her to say it on her own. “Bigamists? Perverts? Drug dealers?”
“Murderers.”
Well. Damn. Alrighty then. Wasn’t expecting that.
“At least, Silar is,” she said in a rush when she caught a glimpse of Magnolia’s horrified expression. “I don’t know what the other men here have been convicted of. They might have been convicted of something else. But ultimately, this is a penal colony for men who committed serious crimes in their youth. That’s why the head honcho here is called the warden. It isn’t some weird translation error. He is literally the warden responsible for the convicts.”
“Like… Like a fucking prison warden?” I hissed in astonishment.
“I mean… kind of?” Cherry said sheepishly. “It’s not really like prison, though! They all have their own houses, their own properties. They’re free to travel around this province and mostly do what they want to do as long as they don’t hurt each other. They earn income from the cattle they sell to the Empire. They just have to, er, get permission depending on what they want to spend that money on. Like, if they want to order things from Elora Station or whatever. It has to get run by the warden. Oh, and they’re not allowed to have any advanced sort of weaponry. No blasters, or any sorts of guns or stunners or lasers. The warden has one, but no one else.”
Yippee. At least if my murderer alien husband decided to turn on me it wouldn’t be with a fucking blaster.
Funny how I’m already thinking of him as my husband. Funny how I’m still thinking of him as my husband…
“Darcy!”
Speak of the devil…
Fallon came crashing into view, literally skidding to a halt in front of us, a massive cloud of dust mushrooming up around his boots. A tail that I hadn’t seen before snapped out, whip-like, from behind him. Fallon waved his ropy orange tail around in the cloud of dust, trying and utterly failing to disperse the reddish cloud. With a frustrated sound, he appeared to give up, and he focused his blazing white gaze on me.
“Darcy,” he said again, slightly less loud this time but just as frantic. “I know that I have killed a man-”
Well, there went the whole “maybe he was convicted of a lesser crime” thing.
“-but it is not so big a problem, is it? It was a long time ago. A very, very long time ago. And really, what is one little, insignificant murder on my record? It only happened once.”
“You only murdered someone once,” I repeated in absolute disbelief. This was the tactic he’d decided to take? Why yes, I did wipe somebody off the face of the planet. But at least I didn’t do it twice!
