“Stop that, I said!”
I freeze in shock. My heart pounds, a frantic caged bird. My breath rattles through my lips.
What scares me most is not Captain Saito’s outburst but her refusal of me. I am still young and fit, my hair the gold that soldiers love. But if she does not want me… if I cannot make myself useful to her…
Maybe she does not favor women. Perhaps she has requested one of the male Cousins to warm her bed, while she looks to a Sister only for confession. Or maybe it’s something more. There are many women who do not just avoid us but hate us, who believe we lure their husbands to our beds during deployment.
But they would never say so aloud; to admonish the Sisterhood is to denounce the Mother herself. And no one, not even Warlord Vaughn, would denounce the Mother, our mortal link to the Goddess, She who weaves the threads of the cosmos together.
“I’m sorry,” Captain Saito says, sounding anything but. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” She runs a hand through her hair and leaves it standing awkwardly atop her head. She is too old for the unkempt, boyish look, and it makes me hate her because I am normal and natural and she is some patched-together soldier girl too big for her captain’s seat, yet she refuses me.
I button my dress back to my neck and cross my arms over my breasts. My eyes burn.
“I don’t want you to do any of… that.” Captain Saito stands and backs away from the desk. From me. She stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, and I cannot help but look for everything that is missing—pictures on the walls of Arturo’s family, awards on the dusty shelves, various antique gunpowder weapons in the glass display case. Even the sheets on the bed have changed to a rumpled, wine-colored fabric. It takes all of my willpower not to cry.
“That’s what I was trying to say,” Captain Saito mutters. Captains shouldn’t mumble, but she does. “I don’t want you Sisters to do anything you don’t want to do.”
It is hard having a conversation with someone who refuses to see the obvious: even the captain can’t give a free pass on all of our duties just because they don’t take advantage of their station. The captain’s armband is a captain’s claim; it is given only to the First Sister to let the crew know that she is not free to be chosen among them. But anyone without the armband?
We end up on our knees.
“Can I ask you something personal?” Captain Saito returns and leans her own hip against the side of the desk, crossing her arms in mirror image of me. It reminds me just how closed off I must look to her, so I straighten myself and press my arms to my sides, pushing my chest out and my chin up. I imagine my Auntie smiling with praise. “Did you choose to become a Sister?”
Every Aunt within the Sisterhood not only chooses that life but pays an exorbitant sum to be there. But those who choose to become Sisters are exceedingly few. Only the poorest and sickest would exchange their voices for food and shelter and health care. And even then, that’s rare. Most of us are sold into it by our parents, like Second Sister, or gifted from a Sisterhood-funded orphanage, like me.
I shake my head to indicate that I did not choose this. What I cannot say is that I don’t understand those who would choose this life. Yes, perhaps it offers more food than begging on the streets, better accommodation than a back-alley brothel, more sights than living in one house beneath a polluted, smog-filled sky on Mars or Earth, but as soon as we are named a Sister, we slip into a long, long sleep and wake up with our words taken from us.
I touch my throat. There’s no scar there, because of course they would never make us ugly in the process. But how could we keep our captains’ secrets if we could repeat them?
Captain Saito turns her back on me. “You’re dismissed,” she says as she gazes at the livecam screen in her room, so big it takes up an entire wall. It offers a prime view of black undercurrents mixing with heated starlight crashing in the Goddess’s galactic ocean.
I want to protest, to find some reason to be of use to her to ensure I will not lose my rank, not be sent from the Juno—but I can think of nothing that she would want from me, so I turn away from her. I miss Arturo, and the certainty I felt at his side, as the door slides closed between us and I consider returning to my private room. But it will stay my room. I am determined not to lose my rank.
* * *
“FIRST SISTER, PLEASE come in.” Aunt Marshae’s eyes twinkle with joy, alongside another emotion I can’t quite name. Something akin to gloating. I half expect her to choke on her words, so stuffed is she with the glee that I have once again been relegated to her care. “Sit down.”
The door closes behind me. I sit.
“You’re not the only Sister to visit me today.” My Auntie does not join me in the reception area but instead looks over the packed bookcase behind me, forcing me to turn in my chair to face her. “Could you possibly guess what for?”
My hands, clenched in my lap, unfold as I prepare to sign. The new captain, I reply.
“Indeed,” she says, fingers fluttering over gilded spines. “They asked for her dossier. Just as you will, I’m sure. But why should I provide it to any of you when you could just as easily seek out the captain to learn of her past yourselves?”
You have helped me before, and I am one of the Mother’s chosen, I sign. And her help would save me valuable time in getting to know Saito Ren. If I knew Captain Saito’s past intimately, I could provide her with better care, and with better care, I could become her favorite companion. I would be safe as First Sister.
“I did,” she says, and lets the unsaid threat hang there: I don’t have to help you again.
I want to keep my position, I sign. I need not point out that she provided me with Arturo’s dossier upon my arrival on the Juno; she seems to remember that all too well.
“But if you become Captain Saito’s favorite, what will stop you from leaving with her when she goes, just as you tried to with Captain Deluca?” My Auntie withdraws a book from the shelf and reads the title. Finding it unsatisfactory, with a little frown she places it back among the others.
There is little I can offer her other than the truth. I have given up on obvious lies from captains, I sign.
She smiles again, and I finally realize what that other emotion is lurking in her eyes: triumph. Like a predator who has successfully cornered its prey, she boasts at her victory over me, reveling in my defeat. I have come to her because she is my only hope, and she knows that, knows that she can use it to her advantage.
Your success is my success, Auntie, I sign to her. What do you want of me?
She could just as easily send me away, punish me for accepting Arturo’s offer. She could choose Second Sister or even Third and give her the dossier, allowing them to grow closer to Captain Saito and eventually replace me. But instead she leaves the bookcase and gathers a file from her desk. “Not what I want, my dear niece,” she says, tossing the folder into my lap. I keep my expression neutral as my hand caresses the navy plastic, opening to the first waxy page.
As soon as I see the name on it, my heart drops. The dossier starts with a letter from someone whom I never expected to offer me an assignment.
High Sister of the Geans, Sovereign of the Goddess, Matriarch of the Earthblooded, Her Holiness, Sanctus Mater. One of the two leaders of all Geans, alongside Warlord Vaughn.