Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42861 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“He makes a better housemaid than me,” I comment to Gruff as we watch him sweeping out one of the stalls.
“That’s because you’re lazy and think you’re too good for brute labor,” Gruff says.
It’s not that I’m too good. It’s that I’m too bad. I don’t belong here. Everybody here thinks I’m either an evil creature, or a stand-in fuck toy for the females they all miss so much.
I have to go. If I stay, I’m just going to end up being another one of Gruff’s little charity cases. He has managed to convince me of one thing, though. This world is too dangerous for Strumpet to run free. When I make my escape, it will be entirely alone. Gruff knows about goats, and Strumpet is happy here. I’ve had my suspicions from the beginning that my mission to this planet was really Strumpet’s mission. She was never my support animal. I was hers. I’ve found her somewhere safe to be, somewhere she can live a happy Strumpet life with caretakers who know how to look after her. She belongs. I do not.
I know Gruff is aware I’m still thinking of getting away. He watches me as much as he can, but he has to sleep sometimes. Unlike mine, his body is fully adapted to the natural Capricorn day and night cycles. That means he sleeps for a very long time. More than long enough to enable me to sneak out and get a good head start under cover of darkness. I try not to think too much about what I’m giving up. I remind myself of who I am and what I am instead.
I managed to learn a few things from Billy. He didn’t want to tell me anything useful, but it is pretty hard to talk without eventually saying something useful. I have an idea about the direction of the city, and it is in that direction I set out, traveling through dense forest. Bucks usually sleep at night, so I can move without worrying too much about running into one or more of them.
This, it soon turns out, is my most successful escape yet. Probably because I don’t head back to my dome. Instead, I strike out in a new direction. I move as swiftly as I can, knowing Gruff will probably come after me if I cannot put enough distance between us and make myself completely untraceable.
Night turns into day, and the forest I am traveling through starts to get wet, and sparse. The types of trees change from dense, lush bushes and towering trunks to an entirely different kind of foliage. I have reached the boundary of a new biome.
These wetlands are expansive. I cannot see the end of them from where I stand. They are also, I discover after poking the ground with a very long stick that slides into the gluggy mud and then keeps going, clearly the sort of place where one can risk being stuck in a bog and then sucked down and forever.
It’s not exactly a nice place. It is brown and smelly, aside from some places where quite beautiful willow type trees send delicate fronds everywhere like an embarrassed housewife trying to tidy up at the last minute with some nice throws.
Fortunately, someone has taken the time to construct what seems like a very serviceable series of literal bridges that run between the tufts of what must be drier and more stable land. Day has begun to break, and I am able to see my path much more clearly. Looks like I’m going to be working my way over dozens of these bridges if I’m to have any hope at all of reaching the other side.
I start over them, glad for the fact that this is clearly an area where wild bucks are going to steer clear. They can’t come leaping out of the bog, anyway. They have to…
Suddenly, I hear the sound of heavy cloven hooves before I see the buck they belong to. One of the trees blocked our vision of one another until we both find ourselves at opposite ends of perhaps the largest bridge in the bog.
He is a tall white buck with curling horns that extend out to the side quite a ways. He is wearing a blue uniform of some kind, one that makes him look official. Either a postman or a soldier. Either way, he does not look pleased to see me.
“Pest!”
Yeah. That tells me all I need to know about the way he is perceiving me. He comes across the bridge not at a clip-clop, but at a clippety-clop, a veritable thunder of hooves trying to get me. I reach for my weapon, but the butt of it tangles in the strap of my pack, which I had hung to one side to get a snack from a few minutes ago. Fuck. These are the precious seconds that make the difference between life and death. Now I am fighting an inanimate object whose strapping suddenly feels like the vengeful tentacles of a monster who wants nothing more than to see me trampled and butted to death by an angry buck.