When the next day cycle began, she woke to discover Cory lying next to her in the bed. Joy mingled with disbelief for several moments, but he wasn’t an illusion. They’d given him back to her!
He screamed when she swooped down on him and gathered him to her. Startled, Bri settled him on her lap to see if she’d hurt him. She didn’t see any signs of injury, though, nothing that would warrant the screaming. It seemed to take forever to calm him down and even when he’d cried until he’d exhausted himself, he stared at her as if he didn’t know her.
Bri studied him in dismay, fighting the urge to burst into tears herself as it dawned on her that that was what the problem was … he didn’t seem to know her. He was young, but surely he couldn’t have simply forgotten her in such a short absence, could he?
They must have done something to him, she decided, feeling her grief abruptly boil into fury. No matter how carefully she checked him, though, she couldn’t see anything to support that theory. She spent most of the time worrying over him, struggling with him because he seemed determined to fight every attempt to soothe or pacify him, even refused to take food from her until he obviously reached a point where he couldn’t resist any longer.
She didn’t go far from the habitat even when they made her go out. She was still weak anyway, and Cory howled when she tried to put him in the carrier. She was exhausted long before she managed to get him down for the night and still couldn’t sleep herself for the anxiety churning inside of her. The second day wasn’t as bad as the first, but it didn’t miss it by much. He was still fussy, still looked at her as if he didn’t know who she was, but sometime in the afternoon that seemed to change. Instead of looking at her as if he had no idea who she was, he looked downright distrustful, angry.
As hard as Bri tried not to interpret his expressions that way, she finally decided that he had finally remembered her, but he believed she’d abandoned him, and he was angry and distrustful because of that.
Inwardly, she raged at the Sheloni, for the first time feeling real, tangible hate for them--hating them so much she felt sick to her stomach. They’d destroyed something important that had developed between her and Cory, and she wasn’t at all certain she could get back.
Trust was so hard to earn, and harder still to earn back once it had been broken, and it wasn’t as if Cory could understand even if she tried to explain that she hadn’t abandoned him. He’d barely gotten to the stage of making any kind of sound beyond crying.
Disinclined to attempt to socialize, still feeling weak and ill, and worried about Cory, Bri didn’t even try to walk the baby when they went out for the first several days. Instead, she settled just outside the door and focused on Cory, struggling to get some response from him besides the blank stares, or accusing looks.
Long before her period finally stopped, though, she’d begun to feel desperate to seek advice from some of the other women. Some of them, she was sure, would know something about babies.
The bastards hadn’t given her anything for ‘the problem’ though, and it took a while for her fears to outweigh the embarrassment of being seen in public in such a condition. She didn’t even have any fucking panties to hold a pad in place, damn them to hell! It was just one more thing the bastards had done to reduce her to the level of lower animal!
If she hadn’t needed answers about the baby, she would’ve just hid until the bleeding finally stopped, but unlike her normal periods, this didn’t stop after a few days. Finally, hoping it just wouldn’t show, Bri gathered Cory in her arms and moved far enough down her yard to see the women at the group habitat.
“Hey!” she called out to get their attention, only realizing after she had that she couldn’t even remember the woman’s name.
The woman she’d spoke to before approached the edge her yard, though.
“Do you know anything about babies?”
The woman looked at her and then stared at Cory. “Not that kind,” she finally said.
Bri stared at the woman in complete disbelief for several moments before fury washed through her. “Fucking cunt!” she yelled, whirled on her heel, and had already started back toward the habitat when Consuelo called to her.
She stopped, turning to look at Consuelo indecisively for a moment. She had the horrible sensation of drippage, but she couldn’t get back into the habitat anyway. After a brief hesitation, she rushed to the edge of the yard and settled on the ground. Thankfully, the Sheloni had given her a gown to wear when they’d sent her back to her own habitat. She pulled it over her knees and settled Cory on her lap as Consuelo settled across from her with Manuel. “Cory doesn’t act like he even knows me,” she said agitatedly. “I don’t know what to think. He just cries and looks at me like I … hurt him. And I’m afraid he really is hurt or sick. I’m at my wit’s end!”
“Manuel cry, too,” Consuelo said sorrowfully. “Miss. He miss.”
Bri swallowed against the knot in her throat with an effort. “You think that’s it? You think it’s just the separation?” She made motions with her hands. “Take away?”
Consuelo nodded vigorously, but Bri could never be certain whether the Hispanic woman understood her or not.
It dawned on her abruptly to wonder if the Sheloni had given Consuelo the same knowledge they’d given her. After glancing around to be certain none of the Hirachi were near enough to overhear, she shifted closer and lowered her voice. “Do you understand the Hirachi tongue?”
Consuelo’s brows shot up. She, too, glanced around. “They put this in your mind, too?”
Bri exhaled a sigh of relief. “Thank god!” This time, she told Consuelo from the beginning how Cory had been behaving.
Consuelo nodded. “Manuel, too. I think he’d forgotten me. They’re young, maybe four months, maybe six, maybe older, though I don’t think so. It’s hard to say. They’re so big, and then, too, they were neglected before. Babies don’t seem to develop normally when they don’t have a mother. This is what my mother told me, anyway. She had worked in an orphanage, and there were always more babies than women to take care of them, and she said they were slow to learn things.
“Anyway, they don’t remember things very long when they are very young. So I think, maybe, they didn’t remember us when they were taken away for weeks.”
Bri thought that over, feeling angry all over again, even though she felt some relief, too, that Consuelo didn’t seem to think anything had happened to either of them. “Sometimes Cory looks at me like he does remember, and … like he’s mad at me.”
Consuelo looked surprised, but before Bri could take that as assurance that she must be wrong, she said, “It’s possible. It’s hard to say what they understand before they learn to talk, but if his expression seems to say that to you, you may be right.” She shrugged. “If they were human babies, I would still not be an expert. I helped my mother with my younger brothers and sisters, but I’ve not had any of my own. And these babies are not human. It’s just not possible to know how they should develop, what is normal for them.”
Bri made a wry face. “You’re a lot closer to an expert than I am. Until Cory, I’d never been around any babies at all.”
“No?” Consuelo asked, obviously surprised. “You’re a natural then, because you are very good.”
Pleased with the compliment, Bri managed a smile. “I’m not sure Cory agrees, but thank you.”
Consuelo nodded, smiling back, but then lifted her head to look around. “You did not tell the one called Kole that you had learned his language?”
Bri looked at her uncomfortably. “No.” She frowned. “I don’t know why. It’s just … I don’t really trust any of the aliens.”
“It would be easier to get to know them if you talked to them and perhaps learn trust,” Consuelo pointed out.
“Maybe,” Bri responded doubtfully and then gave Consuelo a speculative look. “But you didn’t tell the one you were with either.”
Consuelo made a face and then reddened. “Dansk. That one was not interested in talking.”
“He looked … really scary.”
Something flickered across Consuelo’s face. “They all look scary to me,” she said non-committally.
Bri looked down at Cory. Taking his tiny hand in hers, she studied it a long moment and finally lifted it to her lips for a kiss. He closed his fingers over her puckered lips and pulled at them. “They’re not complete barbarians, though.”
“Just mostly. And at that, the more ‘civilized’, or at least more advanced,
Sheloni
are many times worse.”
Bri glanced at her sharply.
“They killed their women.”
A wave of shock rolled over Bri. “The
Hirachi
?”
“Dansk tended to mutter to himself a lot, probably because they have been kept separated since they were taken almost a year ago … his time. I don’t know what that would be in our time. Or maybe only because he lost Lyaaia.
“He alternated between railing at the
Sheloni
and vowing to dismember them if he ever managed to get his hands on them, and cursing himself for his ‘weakness’ in growing attached to Lyaaia.
“She was one of the
Hirachi
women. They had all taken a sacred oath when they became warriors to fight to the death when the
Sheloni
came again, but they were denied the chance. The
Sheloni
merely rendered them unconscious and when they awoke they were here. They gave the
Hirachi
women to the men to breed, but the women vowed they would not give a child to the
Sheloni
. Some of them self-aborted and died. The
Sheloni
prevented the others from doing that, but when the infants were born, they strangled them.
“I got the impression that the men have no say about the children because they belong to their mothers. So they simply accepted what the women had decided.”
Bri frowned. “So you think the men are as bad as the women because they didn’t stop it?”
“Because they didn’t try.”
Bri didn’t believe there was any way the men could have stopped it, but she didn’t disagree with Consuelo. They could’ve at least tried to talk the women out of it even if they couldn’t physically intervene. For that matter, how did either of them know whether the men had tried or not?
On the other hand, Consuelo had one very good point. They were reared to the same customs and beliefs … and those sounded pretty damned barbaric to her.
“He didn’t … Did he hurt you?”
Again an indecipherable expression flickered across Consuelo’s face. “Not … deliberately, I don’t think. But he … you know … big.”
“Oh,” Bri said, turning as red as Consuelo and transferring her attention abruptly to the baby. She hadn’t meant
that
! With relief, she heard the alarm ordering them back inside while she was struggling for something else to say.
Without a word, they both rose, gathered the babies, and headed back.
“Bri!”
Bri stopped abruptly at the call, trying to ignore the odd little leap her heart had executed at the sound of his voice. She had not seen Kole since they had taken her to the examining room, but that wasn’t because she had been carefully avoiding looking toward his habitat. She hadn’t been able to resist glancing that way, but he had not been out since she had been able to leave her habitat.
Pivoting, she turned to look at him. Instead, her gaze locked with that of the woman standing a short distance behind him.
Feeling very much as if she had been turned to stone, Bri didn’t think she even blinked or breathed for several moments. It took an effort for her to drag her gaze from the tall blond to look at Kole.
“Baby?” he asked when she looked at him at last, cupping one hand over his stomach and then pointing to her.
She stared at him uncomprehendingly, but when he pointed at her, she looked down. The spots on her gown sent another jolt of shock through her. This time, however, it galvanized. Without a word, she whirled, heading back toward her habitat at a fast walk, and then a run. She didn’t stop running until she’d leapt through the door.
Chest heaving with the effort to drag in a decent breath, her legs shaking with the exertion, Bri finally wilted to the floor and settled Cory on his belly next to her.
For an endless time, she simply stared sightlessly, her mind perfectly blank. Slowly, the shock began to wear off, however, and as it did her mind degenerated into chaos.
A dry, painful sob erupted from her chest so abruptly that it startled Cory, but for once Bri was in no state to respond to his frightened cries.
Her baby. She hadn’t been having a period. They’d aborted her baby because it was a girl.
Chapter Thirteen
Bri wept. She couldn’t seem to stop crying. She cried until she couldn’t see, until she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t seem to swallow, until Cory gave up crying and lay snuffling beside her.
Abruptly surfacing from her own misery, Bri picked him up and began rocking back and forth, holding him to her chest. He rubbed his wet face all over the shoulder and neck of her gown and then lifted his head to look at her. The moment she burst into tears again, he began wailing.
After a while, realizing that it was her distress that was upsetting Cory, Bri fought for self-control, drying her own face on the gown.
“Stupid!” she muttered under her breath as she struggled to rise with the baby and discovered she’d been sitting on the floor so long she could hardly creep. “I am so stupid!”
She hadn’t even known she was pregnant. She hadn’t wanted the baby. She’d just wanted to do whatever it took to get Cory back.
She didn’t know why it hurt so badly to suddenly realize that that was what had happened to her. For that matter, she didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her before.
She’d been so ill, though, and then worried about Cory.
They’d given Kole another woman to breed. The thought alone was nearly enough to make her lose control all over again.
And she didn’t know why that was either.
It took all she could do to pull herself together long enough to calm the baby down and get him to sleep. Once she’d settled him, though, she went into the bathroom and indulged her urge to fall apart until she was too exhausted to cry anymore, too exhausted to feel anything anymore.