Page 38 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

“You’re right, I would probably make a hash of it,” she says.

“You probably would,” Sam says, her tone cheery. “Not because of your skill, though. You’d have to do it with Ellie’s spear. It’s hardly the best tool.”

Rachel’s blush only deepens.

“She’s Food Sector,” Khadija says, looking up from the pattern she’s been drawing in the sand with a twig. “Ellie, too.”

This doesn’t appear to mean anything to Rachel, who looks nervously back and forth between me, Sam, and Khadija.

“They shave Food Sector workers’ heads,” Sam says. “I’ve not had hair since I was old enough to work. I might moan about it getting in the way, but I won’t be cutting it until it’s down to my waist.” She grins. “Maybe not even then.”

“They made you cut off all your hair?” Rachel’s hand goes to her own gorgeous locks. They’re as matted and dirty as everyone else’s, but there’s no hiding the beautiful colour of them.

The downside of her colouring is much of her body has burned bright pink already. A lot of the girls have caught the sun, but none so bad as Rachel. Her freckled nose is blistered in places, and it must sting every time the heat draws sweat from her skin.

So, all the time.

“Where’d they have you holed up that you never saw anyone from Food Sector?” Khadija asks.

“I was a packer,” Rachel says. “For the clothing factories.”

Khadija nods. “Other side of the district, then.”

“They kept us inside almost all the time. Apartments within the factory complex.”

“Same for warehouse workers.” A moment of connection passes between the two of them. “But our apartments overlooked the routes the Food Sector workers used to walk home. Remember looking out on them when I was a kid, seeing other kids my age, their hair all chopped off.”

“You weren’t one of the people shouting names at us, were you?” Sam says, laughing.

Khadija snorts. “My mother would have flayed me if she heard the word ‘shiny’ coming out of my mouth.”

It’s funny how even though she doesn’t direct the term at me, I still flinch.

“Why shave your heads, though?” Rachel asks, most of the blush gone from her cheeks now.

“Hygiene,” Sam says with a shrug. “Don’t want no bottom tier filth getting in their top tier dinners.”

“Should have cooked for themselves if they were afraid of that, lazy fuckers,” Khadija says, making Sam laugh again.

“Damn right.”

“Didn’t you work in the slaughterhouse, though, Ellie?” Hannah asks. “What do they need to be worrying about hygiene to that kind of level for there?”

I think of the many times I did my job sticky with a feeling of filth coating me. The kind of filth that doesn’t easily wash off.

“They don’t,” Khadija answers when it becomes clear I’m not going to.

“And they could give the prep workers like Sam hats, but they don’t.

Just another way Mercenia keeps us bottom tier girls in line, isn’t it?

Just like making Rachel live where she works so they can squeeze more out of her.

Just like telling us we need a licence to marry then never giving any out. Make sure we don’t forget our place.”

Hannah looks uncomfortable with the anti-Mercenia talks.

She’s one of those people I don’t understand - under the thumb of our corporate overlords, just like the rest of us, but she buys into it.

Thinks it’s all for her own good and the good of society as a whole.

I don’t get it, but I can’t dislike her for it.

We all do what we have to do to survive.

The eggs are big enough that when Sam portions them out, everyone has a decent meal.

“They won’t keep in this heat,” she says as she divides them up, “so eat all of it.”

They don’t need telling twice. They’re bottom tier, all of them except Grace, and she’s not much higher up than the rest of us.

Certainly not high enough to be living well.

They’ve been hungry all their lives. And despite Sam’s lamentations about seasoning, the eggs are delicious - full of flavour and sitting in the stomach with a satisfying weight.

My eyes feel ridiculously heavy as the moons rise in the sky.

I don’t know if it’s tiredness from my exertions or the scrambled eggs filling my stomach, but I don’t rush to volunteer for the first watch, instead sinking into what little comfort the parachute and the warm bodies either side of me can offer. I’m asleep almost instantly.

And standing in a strange space. A tent of some kind with a central pole, a fire burning low in one corner, a gap at the top for the smoke to rise out of.

I’m dreaming, but it feels almost more real than real life.

More vivid, more intense. Just more. I can feel the soft lapping of the fire’s heat against the bare skin of my arms and legs, my Mercenia issue jumpsuit replaced by a tank top and a cute pair of short shorts.

I recognise the shorts. They’re a pair Neris, my best friend at the slaughterhouse, had.

Something I coveted before I understood what it had taken to get them.

I push my mind away from the past and back to the present moment, to my bare feet curling in the furs beneath them, the ticklish feel of it a texture I’ve never experienced before.

In the slaughterhouse we killed cows, their fur short and coarse.

This is what I imagine the guard dogs would have felt like if we had ever been allowed to touch them.

It’s strange and delightful, and I wonder if it’s something in the eggs we’ve eaten that’s making my brain go into overdrive, conjuring up this incredibly detailed space for me to spend the night in.

Or something in the water, perhaps. I’ve never seen anything like this place before.

I reach a hand out to touch the central pole, sure I’ll feel the woodgrain beneath my fingers as clearly as I feel the furs beneath my feet.

But before I can reach it, I feel something else. The tickle of breath against the back of my neck.

I spin, then nearly trip over backwards as I stumble to get away. Because there’s a man in the tent. A man, or… something. He’s not human, that’s for sure, his skin a dusky green, a long, prehensile tail flicking around behind him. He looks at me through a fringe of dark, shiny hair.

I touch a hand to my head, wondering how my dream self presents. I meet the tight curls of hair I have in the real world and feel a ridiculous sense of relief.

He steps closer to me, his silvery eyes roaming across my body. He looks as surprised to see me as I am to see him, his features close enough to human to be recognisable. And off-putting. Because he’s almost handsome.

Okay, he’s really handsome. But he’s also really, really alien. And I don’t know what to make of the fact my mind has conjured him here. What that says about me.

“Forgive me, linasha,” he says, with a voice that licks over my skin, every bit as warming as the fire. “I did not mean to startle you.”

What the hell, brain?

What. The. Hell.