Forging Ties (Ties, Book 3) | ✓

Chapter 20

Hamish walked into the galley in search of something for lunch and found Perry. He had on long rubber gloves that reached up to his elbows and was holding a mixing bowl. Despite the relatively small size of the ship, Hamish had hardly seen Perry since they'd boarded.

"Oh!" Perry set the bowl on the counter and pointed down at it. "I'm just..."

Hamish nodded. "What are you making?"

"Bread. It won't be done until tomorrow because, well, it's a process. You're welcome to have some when it's ready, but I understand if you'd rather not."

"Sounds great." Hamish sat down at the small table in the middle of the room. "Do you eat? Sorry if that's a stupid question, but I don't think you had anything when we went to dinner the other night, and you don't show up for meals."

"I prefer to eat in private," Perry replied as he went back to stirring his bowl of bread ingredients. "It's rather a sight, and not something I would want to subject people to when they're trying to enjoy their own meals. Not having lips makes things a bit messy."

"The fae weren't so kind to you, huh?"

Perry gave a half shrug. "I don't blame them for all this. I found myself with a broken down truck in the middle of a desert I needed to cross with a heavy pack of supplies my people couldn't do without. The fae that found me stayed with me the whole way, bringing me back over and over again. It knew I was willing to give up everything to make it home, so how could I blame it for that?"

"I suppose that's life sometimes, even with the benefit of magic. There aren't always easy options."

Perry poured some flour into the bowl with his dough and began kneading it together. "You're a human, aren't you?"

"Yes."

Perry nodded. "I was too, before all this. My people were engineers, scientists, scholars. Snobs, if I'm honest."

Hamish let out a breath of laughter.

"We thought we were better than everyone. A little community made up of humanity's greatest, though of course too noble and intelligent to stoop to the level of helping the rest of the human race with a war they were badly losing."

Hamish set his elbow on the table and propped his chin up on his hand. "Is that such a bad thing, considering?"

"No, but when things got desperate, we closed the gates. I read through all the old records in the weeks after I got back from that final trip. We made the calculations, figured out how many people we could take in without putting ourselves at risk, and then we tossed those calculations out because we didn't want ordinary people polluting our perfect little community." Perry sprinkled some more flour into the bowl. "That was generations before my time, of course, but it's not like we'd changed at all. One of my closest friends when I was young was apprenticed outside of the community when she was twelve because she was a slow learner. But, when you do fit in, you think it could never happen to you..."

"They kicked you out for looking like that?"

"Not right away, but... yes. After a time, it became clear I was no longer welcome."

Hamish shook his head. "Fuck them, then. Bet you regretted crossing that desert for them after that."

"You know I did, for a time, but then I realised that made no sense. No matter how cruel they were to me, I wouldn't wish death on any one of them. If that's the case, then if there is even one person in that community I would have given my life for, how can I regret it? My young nephew is alive today because I brought back the materials we needed to repair our solar panels. The last time he saw me, he screamed and then cried inconsolably for two hours straight, but he was three at the time so I can hardly hold that against him."