Page 34 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid

“You said ‘planet-side’. Does that mean you guys were…” She pointed up.

“Reared on theGidalan. Yes.” He looked up, as though he’d be able to make out the ship through the boughs and the gloom. “It is a nursery for my kind. There are hybrids being raised even now, likely a hundred young aboard the mothership.”

“What will happen to them now that you guys have rebelled?”

He puffed out a breath.

“We have speculated, but truthfully… we do not know. Fendar monitors their transmissions as often as he can hacktheir communications. If they are retaliating against the young, they have not sent word of their actions to anyone else. Still, it’s no guarantee.”

“What’s down here that they need such a big workforce for? All I’ve seen so far is trees and more trees.”

He grinned at that, releasing his tail to flick lazily through the air. “It’s what’s beneath the trees. Beneath the mountains. A rare mineral used in powering jump drives. The Aurillon call itteserium. Dangerous to mine, to handle.”

“So they send you guys down to do it instead.” She straightened her aching legs.

Her boot brushed against Rentir’s hip, and his tail seized upon her, wrapping loosely around her calf. They both looked at it for a long moment; when she didn’t object, he let out a small sigh.

“What a bunch of dicks,” she muttered, leaning her head back against the tree.

He laughed at that. “You say the strangest things.”

“Mmm, we’ll have you cussing before long. Especially Nyx. She’s going to ruin you guys for real.”

“The towering one with the quick temper?”

She laughed hard at that. “That’s the one.”

“Are you close with the other humans?”

“Some of them. Nyx and Eunha went through a hell of a lot of flight training with me before the mission launched. It made us close. The rest… well, some I like more than others.”

She thought of Lyra looming imperiously at the edge of the room during training and simulations, soaking up all the accolades in the media for funding her own vacation to Lapillus.

“Are there… males with you?” He asked the question so strangely, as if the words were strangling him.

“No. We were an all-women crew. It was supposed to be some kind of feminist fuck-you to the rising misogyny in our culture, I guess, but who really knows what Lyra was thinking?”

“Women?”

“That’s what we are. Uh, since it’s come up, you should probably stick to ‘women’ when you’re referring to one of us. ‘Female’ and ‘male’ aren’t really polite.”

Some of the tension in his shoulders eased. He nodded. “I see. And… what is misogyny?”

She worried her bottom lip, reluctant to be the one to introduce the concept to him. He’d been protective of her, but he hadn’t treated her like she was less than. What if she told him what men were like on Earth and, like a butterfly flapping its wings, it became a tornado she’d have to deal with later?

“Cordelia?”

She met his glowing gaze. “Can I trust you?”

His expression turned fierce. “Always.” No hesitation, no doubt. His tail skirted higher on her leg and tightened around her thigh.

She slid her fingers over it, stroking the soft fuzz that coated his skin. His spots made her fingertips glow purple, like a flashlight pressed to her hand.

“Misogyny is the belief that men are superior to women,” she explained reluctantly, studying the pattern of spots over his tail. “On my world, women are often treated badly. They forced themselves on us, assaulted us, killed us. Told us what to wear, what to say, what we were allowed to accomplish. The roles we traditionally took on were seen as the least valuable. When we tried to take on other roles, we were scorned for upsetting the natural order. Things got better for a while. Then the Resource Wars happened, and things got much,muchworse.”

They’d been trying to make an argument for shunning women from the workforce entirely around the time they’dlaunched. They were trying to claim that women were some precious resource that needed to be protected by being kept at home and out of society. The argument was obtuse; there were no less women than men. It didn’t matter. There were plenty of talking heads who were all too willing to go along with it.

They passed bills to ban abortion and involuntarily sterilize certain women in the same breath. When she left, they were kicking around laws about banning IVF, tightening down on who could adopt, and requiring a man’s signature on all major financial documents—a grim prospect now that no-fault divorce was a thing of the past.