97
Later that night, tired from cleaning, I crawled into what was becoming my permanent bed. It slid shut and I shuddered at the quiet darkness. The only thing I could hear was my breathing. All I saw was black. Perhaps I would fall asleep soon and not be subjected to the desolation of this punishment.
The dreams came again that night. This time I dreamed I was on Earth scrubbing my mother’s house. My uncles walked around dropping food and other things on the carpet, watching me clean it up. It was an annoying repetitive dream, just like it had been when I had lived it.
Suddenly, the dream changed slightly. Master Damien and his Brothers were watching me work. It was embarrassing they should see what slovenly piles of crap my family was.Property © NôvelDrama.Org.
I couldn’t seem to stop cleaning, even with my owners standing and looking around. I swept, mopped, and scrubbed, but things never got cleaner. Dirt and grime appeared out of thin air or my uncles made another mess.
My uncles had destroyed the house for the fun of watching me try to put it back together. In my dream, when my Uncle Eddy dropped a large pile of cheesy dip on the carpet for the fifth time, Master Damien struck him. Uncle Eddy flew across the room and smashed against the wall and slid down uncoscious. Suddenly the floor, the walls, and the entire house looked clean and fresh.
I sighed with relief and stood up.
Everything evaporated as I stared at Master Damien. How I had wished to do that very thing many times over, but I didn’t know how to knock out a man my uncle’s size. Desperately, I wanted to learn.
“It’s easy,” Master Damien told me. “We’ve been learning to fight since we were very small.”
It was the strangest dream I’ve ever had. I watched as my young Masters learned to fight. It was like they invited me to share their memories, by morning I felt like a Warrior.
I was awake and nauseated by the time the men let me out of the box in the morning. I leapt up and ran for the bathroom. Had I spent one more moment in there I would have thrown up on myself.
That afternoon at the Keepers I crept along the dunes until I was mostly alone. The other girls that came down here did so for quiet. I wasn’t making noise, so they ignored me.
It had been a strange dream, but I felt like I knew how to fight. I searched my mind and found memories from the dream. I swung and kicked the way I had seen the men do. It seemed I had the right idea, just no strength or practice with the movement.
Fuji and Rose came down and wanted to know what I was doing. As soon as I saw them I stopped, but they stayed.
“Is it a new dance, Ciara?” Fuji asked.
“No,” I said trying to figure out what to call it. “I was just fooling around. My… uncles taught me to fight and I was just doing the moves they showed me.”
It was a plausible lie.
“Show us,” Rose encouraged settling down.
I demonstrated the moves, but I was far less adept than the figures in my dream had been. We all laughed as I struggled to get better. It was a fun and distracting way to spend the afternoon.
The men came and got me at night as usual. We went into their rooms and they stood at the threshold staring at me. Usually they went down the bathhouse now, but they didn’t look like they were getting ready to go.
“When will it come?” one of them asked me.
“I don’t understand, Master. When will what come?”
“The menstruation,” he pronounced carefully. “It has been seventy day cycles since the last one. We are being patient. You told us this was a regular cycle. They should be even.”
A terrible thought came to me then. The sickness every morning was not illness.
“Yes, it should,” I said raising my hands and taking a step back. I was sure they should not know. “It’s not something I control. My body does it when the hormones-”
“What is that word?” the long haired man interrupted me.
I tried desperately to explain, but this was one of those times. They locked me in the box that night for not being honest. To me, it seemed they just preferred to sleep without me. For once I was glad to be alone and panic on my own.
My period was late. The men didn’t know what that meant, but I did. A late period meant something very different from what they feared.
My mother had suffered morning sickness with me. She’d lost weight and had to be placed on supplements. Even my grandmother had suffered the damned sickness with every one of her many children. This seemed so much like what they described.
It couldn’t be, I assuaged myself. Master Damien had said this could not happen. He and his Brothers had been so sure, but the truth was hard to refute.
I had menstruated, which was odd. That must mean I was fertile again. The morning sickness was hard to contest, even if I wanted to. Very little else could cause the daily illness that went away on its own. It was all adding up to a point I tried desperately to avoid.
The men were wrong. My hands felt my lower stomach as though the nonexistent bulge would suddenly begin to form. I was carrying a child.