“I vote aye! Aye for Fallon!” Fallon said again, nearly jumping out of his chair with what was clearly anxiety that he had not been heard before. “And if these any of idiots do not want their women then I will take theirs, too!”

“You’ve never even been with one woman,” Zohro snapped, “what in the great blazing span of my largest bull’s backside would you do with four?”

Fallon ripped off his hat and scrubbed vigorously at his yellow hair, frowning.

“They would not all be my women,” he said awkwardly. “But one could be mine. And the others could live with us if they so chose. I have space.”

“You have space inside your skull is what you have,” Zohro muttered.

Garrek growled a warning. My tail tightened around my knife.

“Enough,” said the warden, rising from his seat. He towered over even tall Zohro and cut an imposing figure as he rested his claws upon his stunner. “Give me your votes and be done.”

“I vote no,” Zohro said, flinging himself back into his seat under Warden Tenn’s baleful white glare. “I will not further chain myself to this place by marrying. If I am to have sons or daughters, they will be born in the empire of Zabria or not at all.”

Fallon visibly tensed, his hope-hungry gaze going to Garrek.

Garrek rubbed his jaw again and sighed.

“I’ve got a new convict-ward from the empire. I can barely keep him under control and take care of my herd at the same time. We almost didn’t make it through the winter. What am I going to do with a female on top of all that mess?” I thought I could hear the strained tinge of regret in his voice when he heavily but firmly said, “No. I vote no.”

“Unbelievable!” Fallon exploded. “You complain of our lives here and then you shit on the one chance we’ve gotten in dozens of cycles to actually make things better! If we say no, the women will go to Warden Hallum’s men! Warden Hallum! Have you two lost your senses?”

Then Fallon turned to me. I’d never seen the young man’s eyes so white.

“Two ayes, two nays. The vote comes down to you, Silar,” Warden Tenn grunted.

I felt every man’s gaze upon me like a touch.

A woman. A wife. I wouldn’t know what in the bloody blazes to do with such a thing. None of us would. We all came here before puberty. Cut off from society, forever separated from the females of our race before we were even old enough to want them. I barely knew how to speak to these men whom I’d known since childhood. What could I possibly have to say to a woman?

Silent Silar. I liked to be alone.

I forced myself to imagine it – to imagine somebody beside me, in my house, in my space – and my tail went tight with tension. But I could not quite tell if it was a bad sort of tension or not.

It wound tighter.

A woman in my kitchen. In my bedroom.

In my bed.

Something that almost felt like panic choked me at the very same moment that my flesh stirred hotly beneath my pants. Questions pounded inside my head in time with my rapid heartrate.

What would I do with her? How could I keep a female happy here? Here, in the sun and the dust and the ruins of my life? How could I possibly hope to deserve her? A wife!

And how could I turn off this desperate, savage wanting now that it was suddenly here? I’d never dared to allow myself to want something like a woman before. There was no point. When my cock got too hard to ignore, I used my own fist with a grim sort of efficiency and then I got back to work.

There was always work. So much work that it left no more room for wanting.

Until now.

A woman.

No. I could not have her. I would not.

I would probably do something wrong and hurt her or harm her or Empire forbid, break her. We were convicts, reviled by our own people, left out here on this distant planet to rot for so long that there was no hope of ever rehabilitating us. What could I offer a female? I, a white-eyed feral fool, as the warden had so aptly pointed out?

I knew cattle. I knew how to tell when a storm was brewing simply by the slant of the light. I knew which grasses were toxic and which could heal. Which holes housed venomous ardu serpents.

I knew nothing about keeping a wife. Nothing.

“I’ll take one.”

The warden scowled at me. Fallon did not appear to breathe.

“You’ll take one what?” Warden Tenn asked.

“Maybe he means to take a break. To consider!” Fallon said in a rushed exhale. “Give the man a moment and let him think! This is the most important decision he is ever going to make!”

“I will not take a break,” I replied. “I meant-”

Someone slit my throat and stop me. I’m a fool.

“-I’ll take one. A wife.”

Fallon leaped up. His tail, still wrapped around the chair leg, sent the whole thing clattering backwards to the floor. He stood, his frame seeming to buzz with energy. It was as if he wanted to do so many things at once that all he could manage was to stand in place and tremble with the force of his fraying desire.

The warden tipped his hat again. “Three ayes against two nays. The vote is cast and the bride program will commence,” he said.

Zohro hissed a sigh. Garrek said nothing, though – and this was strange – he did not look disappointed that the vote had not gone his way.

“When will they arrive?” Fallon asked, white blooming hot and frantic in his eyes.

“That is not the question you should be asking,” Zohro said with a dark smirk. “The question you should be asking is, what is wrong with them? No decent Zabrian woman would agree to come here. To be cut off forever from Zabria and marry convicted outcasts like us.”

“Oh. Did I not say it before?” the warden asked with a frown. And then, casually, as if he were not dropping something as stunningly obliterating as a boulder atop our heads, he added, “They are not Zabrian females. Your brides will be human.”

2SILAR

“Do you know what a human is?” Fallon asked quietly as we both unwound the reins of our mounts from the posts we’d tied them to outside the warden’s base. Warden Tenn was still inside with Zohro. Garrek had already departed, eager to get back to check on his new convict-ward and make sure, in his words, “the boy hadn’t burned the place to the ground and let every one of my blasted cattle loose into the wilds.”

Therefore, I was the only one to hear Fallon’s question and I supposed it fell upon me to answer.

“No,” I answered him. I’d heard of the human-run commerce hub Elora Station. I knew some Zabrians travelled there for trade. But before coming to this penal colony, I’d never been off-world before and I’d certainly never glimpsed a creature called a human. I doubted any of us had, besides perhaps Zohro, the lone male among us who’d come from a family with any sort of wealth.

“Well,” Fallon said, his face pulled in an odd grimace of troubled hope. “They are female, and they are willing to marry us, and that is what counts, I suppose. As long as they are healthy and hardy and biologically compatible-” He gave me a startled look. “You do think we will be biologically compatible with them, don’t you?”

“Don’t know,” I grunted, swinging myself up into the saddle upon my mount, Tarion. Tarion was a shuldu, a large four-legged herding beast native to this planet. I patted his neck, his short-haired hide the same colour as the reddish dust caked along the hard, dry ground beneath his hooves.

Fallon mounted his black shuldu, taking some time to rub dust from his mount’s horns with a spare rag before casting me a wistful look.

“I wish one of us besides Oaken had a fully working data tab,” he lamented.

We all had data and communication relay tablets – in various states of disrepair – that Warden Tenn used to communicate with us. But only Oaken had been able to restore visual data – though grainy – to his tablet’s screen. The rest of us only had audio capacity.