Page 5 of Remmen

Then he stopped and looked up. Straight at me.

I jerked back from the glass hard enough to knock the table, heart going, face hot, as if the look had reached all the way up here and burned me.

CHAPTER 2

ANNE

I stared at the giant chair opposite my desk like I could will a mentally fragile minotaur into it by sheer manifestation.

Apparently my powers didn’t work in New Knossos. And they hadn’t been working for more than a week. When I’d taken the job, it had come with a certain promise of people to help. Instead, I stared at dust motes.

“No takers?” Chelsea leaned against the doorframe and pursed her lips.

“Like you’re doing any better.” I didn’t glare. She hadn’t earned that and I could be a big girl. But sitting around all day waiting for the bulls to come to me was making my teeth ache.

“I had one.” Chelsea came in and folded herself into the client chair, which swallowed her the way it would’ve swallowed me. Her feet didn’t touch the floor. Neither would mine. Everything in this town was built for a body twice our size, and the furniture in my own office made me feel like a kid sent to the principal. “Sort of. He stood in the doorway, looked at the couch, and left.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He said the roof was crooked.” She considered it. “Looks fine to me.”

I laughed, and it came out uglier than I meant it to.

Chelsea wasn’t wrong to be patient. But it was still hard to sit still. She was going by the official procedure book, which had been drilled into our skulls during our off-planet orientation, and the procedure book said exactly this: Give them time. Let them come. Don’t push a traumatized population, don’t chase, don’t make the office a place a man felt cornered. Build safety. Wait.

It was good advice. That advice had also never sat in an empty room for eight days while an entire town of men who woke up screaming decided they’d rather tough it out.

“One of them reached out,” I said.

Chelsea’s eyebrows went up. “Who⁠—”

“Not to me. Not to you. To Giles.” Who was, currently, the only one of the three of us anybody had voluntarily approached, and Giles had a broken arm and a bedside manner like a wet towel. “And Giles says the guy’ll probably bolt if he has to actually talk. Especially to a woman.” I turned my pen over on the desk. “I’m not sure New Knossos will need all three of us.”

“They might come around.”

“How much trauma training do you have?”

“Anne,” she said gently, and I held back a sneer. Chelsea had that caring, therapisty way of speaking that got right under my skin. I faced my clients with a bit more bite. “It’s been eight days. Pilot programs take time. Nezara knows that. The Agency knows that. Nobody’s grading us.”

Nobody’s grading us yet.

She meant it kindly. It landed like a stone. Chelsea had a stack of references and a career to walk back to. Me, on the other hand? If the men here were desperate, then I was their twin. There was nothing for me back on Earth and the Alien Matchmaking Agency had taken a chance on my less-than-stellar references.

This had to work.

“Early days yet,” I agreed.

Chelsea nodded like I’d said something wise.

She went back to her office, which was as empty as mine, to be patient in it.

I sat there another minute. Two. A dust mote found a bar of light and rode it down, unhurried like it belonged. I didn’t.

Then I stood up fast enough that the chair barked against the floor.

I knew exactly the woman I’d turn into if I let the room win. Patient. Useless. Defeated and fired.

Screw that.