“Please, Res. Tizlah, just try to put yourself in Keelah’s shoes…er, in her place for a moment,” she amended quickly, remembering that the Saurians didn’t wear shoes. “Imagine if you were a young girl—just barely entering womanhood—and someone snatched you from your home and forced you to go to the docks and—”
But Res. Tizlah was shaking her head.
“I have no more time for this—I have a household and a compound to run,” she said curtly. “Do you want to go to the Market or not?”
Seeing she was getting nowhere, Bobbi decided to drop the subject—for now.
“Yes, Res. Tizlah,” she said submissively. “I’d like to go, thank you.”
“Then hurry up and get ready if you want to go with the other girls,” the Saurian woman snapped. She gave Bobbi a curt nod and stalked off to another part of the kitchen to supervise something that was cooking for dinner that night.
Bobbi watched her go with mixed feelings. On one hand, she still thought that Res. Tizlah had done a wonderful job mothering Dragon after he had lost his parents. The fact that she had been able to reach outside herself and her narrow worldview and care for an orphaned boy who was not even of her own species, said a lot for her.
On the other hand, she seemed determined not to notice what was going on in her household—or at the very least, to take it lightly and as a matter of course. What did it matter if Zerlix used a lot of Pleasure Girls and beat them whenever he felt like it? He was a man, after all, and males enjoyed certain privileges in Saurian society. Privileges that Res. Tizlah was not about to question—especially if questioning them meant she had to admit that she’d raised a petulant, narcissistic, sadistic monster as one of her sons.
Shaking her head, Bobbi went to get the warm cloak that Dragon had gotten for her to wear on the days it was her turn to work in the gardens. She needed to be well bundled up if she was going out into the Saurian weather, which was desert-dry and bone-achingly cold.
Well, at least this will give me a chance to observe more of Saurian society, she told herself. I’ll get to see how their economy works—at least on a small scale.
She hoped she would get to do a bit of bartering herself—she’d gotten pretty good at it while living with the Orniths and she wouldn’t mind using her skills. Also, she intended to keep her eyes open for ways of escape.
No matter how fond she was getting of Dragon, she had a life and a career back home. And she couldn’t spend the rest of her life on this frozen, misogynistic hellhole of a planet where women were treated like dirt under the men’s feet and she was constantly surrounded by blatant cruelty she could do nothing about.
She was just glad at the moment that she would be getting away from her prospective future Mother-in-Law and out to get some fresh air. It would be really good to leave the compound, even if it was only for a little while.
She had no idea how quickly her simple trip to the Market would turn deadly.
41
“It’s nice to be out in the warm weather,” Keelah remarked as they strolled, arm-in-arm, out of the big family house, past the rows of smaller, single-story dwellings that belonged to the enforcers and their wives, and through the gates of the Crimson Blades compound.
Bobbi shot her a look.
“You call this ‘warm’?” She couldn’t keep the incredulity out of her voice as she wrapped the thick cloak Dragon had bought just for her more tightly around herself.
The cloak was deep red and had a hood that covered her ears and shielded her face from the biting wind. The big Kindred had also given her a matching scarf which she had pulled up over her mouth, so her voice sounded rather muffled. Her hands were jammed deep in the pockets, which were lined with soft heechee fur, like the blanket they slept under at night. And still, she was cold.
But Keelah only shrugged.
“It’s summer on the Southern Continent—of course it’s warm.” She made a stifled noise and pulled the collar of her own thin dress away from her scaly throat. “A bit too warm for my taste—but then, it’s been an unseasonably hot summer and I grew up in the North where it’s much cooler, as you know.”
Her words made Bobbi think again about how she had to get off this godforsaken planet. If this was summer—and a hot summer at that—how was she going to survive in the winter? How low did the temperatures drop? Would it be akin to living in some northern country back on Earth or did they plummet to levels where ordinary humans couldn’t survive?