Jane Carver of Waar by Nathan Long Read Free Book Online Page B

four-armed teenybopper play dollies with you ’til you grow old and die?”
    Sai shuddered. “No. That I will not do. I am praying to the Seven for the courage to find a way out. An honorable man would rather die than submit to such indignities.”
    I squeezed his shoulder. “That’s the spirit.”
    I lay back, feeling better. Sure, Sai said it was impossible, but at least he wasn’t giving up. That was half the battle. If I had to drag him around like a sack of potatoes we’d get nowhere fast.
    There were two moons overhead. Well, if nothing else was going to convince me this wasn’t all some big prank Steven Spielberg had decided to pull on me, that would. I don’t care how big your special effects budget is, nobody launches another moon just to make a fool out of some big, dumb biker chick. There was a fat blue moon peeking over the sawtooth skyline of the tents, and a little bright one that zipped across the sky so fast you could see it move. They gave everything around me two shadows. Kind of pretty, but all I could think was that all that light made making a break for it that much harder.
    Beyond the moons were stars I’d never seen. Riding cross country on my bike and sleeping rough all those years, I’d gotten pretty good at picking out the constellations. They were all gone. I got hit with another wave of homesickness. Not even the stars were right. Where was I? Where was Earth? I started wondering if any of those little pinpricks out there was the Sun. My sun. Man, I sure went from happy to depressed awful fast, huh? Being stranded on another planet’ll do that to you.
     
    ***
    From then on things slipped into a routine; not exactly comfortable or happy, but not torture either, at least not for me. Queenie gave Sai about three days to get back on his feet. After that we’d either go up to the plains to dig for the tubers, or along the creek upstream from the camp to hunt in the shallows and under rocks for snails with finned shells and emerald green crawdad things.
    The crawdads only had four legs. I began to notice that all the bugs, from winged biters to crawly collectors to hopping blood-suckers, had only four legs. Maybe One-Eye wasn’t just being an asshole when he called me and Sai insects.
    Once I got into the rhythm of the life I actually didn’t mind it. I’ve always been more physical than mental, and heavy labor makes me feel useful. It toughened me up too. They didn’t let us wear anything more than loincloths—just another way to remind us we were animals—so after a bad week of pink peeling, I ended up covered in so many freckles I looked like a drop-cloth—which is as close as I ever come to getting a tan. After two weeks, I’d built up and thinned down enough that you could see my abs and biceps, even when I wasn’t flexing. I felt better and stronger than I had in years. I even stopped craving Marlboros, mostly.
    But I made sure I didn’t show my true strength. I held back; digging and lifting just a little bit more than the others, just enough for Queenie to appreciate me, but not enough for anyone to take me for a threat. I was a “good girl” and a happy little worker, and I kept an eye out for the main chance.
    Sai didn’t take to it like I did. Even though physically he recovered pretty quickly, mentally he was about as lively as a sloth with a barbiturate problem.
    After what he’d said I kept expecting him to snap out of it, but he never did. I didn’t know what to think. Was he playing possum like me? If he was, he had an Oscar coming his way. He stumbled through each day in a sleepwalk fog, shuffling and staring at his feet and harvesting about half what the rest of us did. Not that he was allowed to work that much anyway. Kitten, who seemed to spend more time gossiping with her girlfriends than she did working, led him around like a lap dog, petting him, dressing him up in cast-offs that must have come from other slaves, both male and female, tying colorful