Page 144 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lorna
T he words fire out of me, unspoken for so long. The truth at the core of me that all other lies have been built around.
I pinch my eyes shut so I don’t have to see the disgust on Shemza’s face, the concern and affection turn to hatred. My arms wrap round my knees as I try to ball myself up as small as possible, as if I could disappear from inside my own head.
“Would you explain to me why he called you Joanna?”
Shemza’s voice is so soft, curious, it surprises me into opening my eyes, looking at him. He’s still calm, still measured. There’s a tightness to his shoulders, his jaw, that wasn’t there before, but otherwise he keeps his emotions in check. I hate that I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“Because that’s my name. My real name. Lorna is just the girl whose place I took on the transport ship that brought me out to your world. I’m a liar, Shemza, I’ve lied about everything. Who I am, where I come from, even my own name. You don’t know anything true about me.”
I’m lashing out, just as Molly has been doing, trying to find the right combination of words to hurt him. When he just grins at me, I don’t know whether to be relieved or enraged.
“That is also a lie. I know many true things about you, my Lorna.”
I give a bitter laugh. “You say that while calling me by my stolen name.”
He scoots closer to me on the bed, cautious in his approach, though when he’s hesitant to touch me, I don’t think it’s because he finds me abhorrent. He seems more concerned about frightening me. Which just goes to show that none of this is sinking in for him yet.
He brushes a hand over my hair, smoothing it back behind my ear, then cupping my chin, a thumb stroking along my jaw. My eyes flutter closed, my breath coming out of me jagged with desire.
“Is your love for Ahnjas and Jassal a lie?”
“No,” I say, firm. Of all the things I’ve done since I arrived in the raskarran forest, being with them is me at my most true.
“And is your joy in watching birds a lie?”
“No…”
“Is your kindness a lie?”
“Yes.”
I fill my voice with heat, hope it breaks past his stubbornness.
“So when it was the thunderstorm, and you wrapped Ellie in the furs I gave to you so that she might be warm, was that a lie?”
I hesitate. “No?”
“So your kindness is not a lie.”
I open my mouth to protest, but no words come out.
“Your desire to be stronger, even though you know I would carry your water every day for you - all the way from your hut and all the way back if you wanted - is that a lie?”
I shake my head, my voice stolen by emotion and his calm certainty. He leans closer to me, speaking his next words against my skin.
“Is the way you lean into my touch a lie? The way your heartspace races when I am close? The way your body trembles with need for me even now?”
“No,” I croak.
He sits back, gives me space. Air rushes in where there was none before, but I find I’d rather have him up close, stealing it all from me again.
“Then you do not lie so much as you think.”
He says it as if it’s the most simple thing in the world.
“Shemza…”
“My linasha, do you think perhaps this is what your cage is built from? The lies you felt you had to tell? And if you have not told so many lies as you think, then perhaps the cage is not so difficult to escape.”
“Shemza, I don’t think you understand. I killed my husband. I murdered him. That sort of thing isn’t forgivable. There’s no place for me in the tribe without my lies.”
“You saw my brothers kill to protect you and your sisters from the Cliff Top tribe. You know Anghar and Ellie killed others who attacked them. Is there no place for any of us?”
“It’s different.”
“Then show me. Show me how it is so that I understand.”
He gestures in the direction of the door. I look to it, expecting to see the aviary door again, or maybe the door to my bedroom, but instead, it’s a cell door.
I know exactly what I’m going to find behind it.
“Okay,” I say. “You want to see? Come and see.”
I stride across the room ahead of him so I’m not tempted to take his hand.
The heavy cell door should be locked, but it isn’t.
Of course it isn’t. I pull it open and step through into the corner of the library in the prison where Rosa and I used to hang out sometimes.
It was a leftover from the days when Mercenia cared even a little about their prisoners.
There weren’t any books in it. But it was somewhere you could go for a little privacy, if you didn’t mind the slightly creepy empty bookshelves and the smell of mouldering carpet.
Rosa and I have made something of a pillow fort - hardly the kind that we could have made in our homes, but the thin prison blankets and the lumpy pillows were still serviceable.
Rosa managed to get some tacks - god only knows where from - and we’d pinned the blanket up on the shelves, lying on our pillows, talking as we listened to the rain falling outside, a never-ending torrent.
She has her hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun, strands of it falling loose at the front, and maybe I should have known what was coming, because that’s how Rosa dressed for the guards she wanted to please. The way she thought she looked best.
We’re laughing about something, and I can’t really remember what, so I can’t exactly hear what we’re saying.
Just the blur of voices and laughter and Rosa looking at me in a way I only recognise now I’ve seen the same look on Shemza’s face.
I was only eighteen when this happened. Still na?ve and innocent to a fault.
Rosa says something and I shove her playfully. She fights back, wrestling with me until I’m pinned underneath her. And then she’s lowering her face, touching her lips against mine in an urgent, passionate kiss.
I remember almost being swept up in it. Almost kissing her back. But lonely and unhappy as I was, I never felt that way about Rosa, and I knew she would be hurt more if I tried to go along with it.
I watch myself gently push her back. Watch her face fall, dread coming into her expression as she shuffles back.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have. I…”
“Rosa, it’s okay,” I say.
Her head drops into her hands, her shoulders shaking with the sobs she’s trying to contain.
“It’s not okay,” she moans. “Why can’t I stop? Why can’t I ever stop?”
“She did stop,” Shemza says, confused.
The little scenario in front of us pauses as I turn to him.
“She’s not talking about kissing me.”
“Then what?”
His increasing confusion is adorable, and he doesn’t seem at all perturbed to see another woman kissing me.
“Do raskarrans have same-sex relationships? Two women together, or two men?”
“Yes. And sometimes two males, one female. Two females, one male. Whatever combination Lina decides is best.”
Of course. When relationships are arranged by your goddess, you wouldn’t have any right to question who gets put with who. It’s a beautiful side effect of the dreamspace I hadn’t considered before.
“That’s not allowed where I’m from. Rosa…
This is a prison. A place where bad people are put.
It only happens on the top tiers. The other girls, they’re from the bottom.
If they do something wrong, they’ll be moved to a harder work detail.
Something that will make them sick quickly, or wear them out until they can’t keep going.
That’s their punishment for breaking the rules.
On the top tiers where I came from, they were kinder in some ways.
They just locked us away. Rosa is in the prison because she loved a woman. ”
“I am not sure I fully understand.”
“Well, she’s about to explain it to me.” I gesture to the frozen scene, and it starts moving again.
“Rosa, it’s okay. I won’t tell anyone. I swear.”
My past self reaches forward and grabs her hand, squeezing it. Rosa gulps down air as she tries to stop crying. “You really mean that, Jojo? You won’t tell the warden? Have me moved?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“But… I just… defiled you.”
“You kissed me. I’ve had worse.”
I was thinking of my wedding. The moment when the officiant said, ‘You may now kiss the bride.’
Rosa gives a choked laugh, then scrubs at her eyes with her jumpsuit sleeves. “God, I’m such a dick. Prison is supposed to teach you a lesson, so they say. Guess I haven’t learned mine yet.”
None of the Deviants ever talked about what they’d done to get themselves thrown into prison.
It was like an unwritten rule. This was as close to a confession as I’d ever heard from any of them, and I remember the sinking feeling of dread in my stomach, how it seemed to weigh four times as much as it had a moment before.
But I still couldn’t help myself. I still had to ask.
“You’re in here because…” My past self can’t quite think of a way to form the question that wouldn’t sound judgemental before Rosa pins me with a glare.
“Because I’m aberrant. Because I want to fuck women, not men. Yes, that’s why I’m in here. I fell in love with a girl and when my father found out, that was the end of me.”
“But… Your stories.”
All her stories, always about handsome men. So convincing that most of the other girls on our block were sure she’d been imprisoned for infidelity.
Rosa shrugs a shoulder. “I slept with a lot of men. To convince people that’s what I wanted.
To convince myself that’s what I wanted.
Some of them even gave half a damn about whether I enjoyed it.
I tried everything, but it never took. Nothing any of them did ever came close to the feeling I got just putting my hand in hers.
Then I couldn’t take it anymore. All that want just bubbled up out of me and I kissed her.
And I knew it was wrong, knew it was a perversion, but I never felt anything better in my life. ”
The look in her eyes begs me to believe her. I never was sure if she was trying to convince me that she knew it was wrong, or that it could feel so good.
“My father saw us.”
She didn’t have to say anything else. I could imagine the beating she took, that her lover took. Every father I ever met on the top tiers was an angry, bitter man who tried to keep control with his fists. And now she’s in prison, locked up for the rest of her life. For a kiss.
“That’s all you did?” My voice is twisted by the gut-wrenching sadness and the horror of it.
“That’s all any of us did,” Rosa says, tears in her eyes.
“I was here for five years before you arrived, Jojo. I know all these girls and all their secrets. Annabeth shoplifted the make-up her parents couldn’t afford to buy her so she could fit in with her friends.
Joy got involved in a political group campaigning for rights for the lower tiers.
Maddie got too drunk at a party and a couple of the boys there didn’t bother to check if she was conscious enough to be into it. ”
Even now, two years and an interstellar journey removed from it all, my stomach still drops.
“That’s not… she didn’t…” my past self babbles, incoherent with grief for the girls in my cell block.
“They did do something wrong,” Rosa says, suddenly savage.
“They all did the same thing wrong. They humiliated their families. Just like I did. Just like you did. The make up Annabeth stole wasn’t the problem.
It was the fact that she had to. That told the world about the state of Daddy’s bank account.
Her crime was doing irreparable damage to Daddy’s reputation.
Or that she could have. If she stayed around.
But Mercenia sweeps in with an offer - we’ll make this go away.
We’ll tidy this mess. You can carry on as normal.
Your daughter has the bad gene. The one that the bottom tiers have.
Not your fault. We move you to a new district, start you afresh.
You never had a daughter. And little Annabeth lives the rest of her life in the Correctional Facility. ”
“Why not just kill us and be done with it?”
“Coz then it’s over, isn’t it?” Rosa says.
“Mummy and Daddy can go on with their lives and forget about all of this. Mercenia doesn’t want you to forget.
They want you looking over your shoulders for the rest of your life.
Looking at your neighbours and wondering how many of them have daughters locked away somewhere.
They don’t want you to trust anyone or anything. That’s how they keep us all in line.”
I’m crying. I’m crying in the past and in the present.
I’m crying for beautiful Rosa and the nameless girl she was never allowed to love.
I’m crying for Annabeth doing what I always used to do - trying to fit in.
I’m crying for Joy being punished for trying to do some good in a fucked up world.
I’m crying for Maddie. Punished when she was the victim.
When those boys probably didn’t even get a slap on the wrist.
“So what shitty excuse of a reason they got you in here for?” Rosa asks, brushing aside her own tears and trying to assert that usual Rosa attitude.
“I killed my husband,” I say.
Four little words. I let them out. I shouldn’t have.
Rosa’s eyes go wide with fear as she scrambles to get away from me, and I turn away from the scene, not wanting to watch her as she runs, not wanting to watch myself crumple.
Rosa never speaks to me again after this.
None of them ever do.