Read Love: BBW Alien Lottery Romance (Chosen by the Karal Book 2) Online
Authors: Harmony Raines
Tags: #General Fiction
Love: BBW Alien Lottery Romance (Chosen by the Karal Book 2)
Chapter Twenty Four – The Hierarchy
Chosen by the Karal
(Book Two)
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Note from the author:
My books are written, produced and edited in the UK where spellings and word usage can vary from U.S. English. The use of quotes in dialogue and other punctuation can also differ.
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All rights reserved. This book, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written consent of the author or publisher.
This is a work of fiction and is intended for mature audiences only. All characters within are eighteen years of age or older. Names, places, businesses, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, actual events or places is purely coincidental.
© 2015 Harmony Raines
Silver Moon Erotica
Kindle Edition
Silence. They all simply looked at her. These people, who loved her and cared for her. All of them staring at her with disbelief, while on the Stream, her face flashed up.
“Why?” her dad asked. “Why do you want to leave us?”
How could she explain that she didn’t? She had not entered the lottery so that she could leave them. She had entered the lottery to help them.
“I know I’m a strain on you, Dad. You and Mom have supported me so much, but I am never going to get a job. There is nothing here for me. For any of us. So I put my name in the lottery.”
“Celia, we can manage, We have so far.”
“By scrimping and saving and going without. I can’t bear watching you go through the budget every week and seeing the worry on your faces.”
“Celia, honey,” Her dad came to her, tears in his eyes, tears that made her heart want to burst out of her chest and leave her, so that she didn’t have to feel his pain and guilt. “If we’ve ever made you feel that way, I’m so sorry.”
His voice caught in his throat and she had to bite her lip hard to stop herself crying. She couldn’t let them know how hard this was on her. She had entered the lottery one day last week; her mom had sent her to the store to get some bread. Celia had watched as her mother counted out the coins, having to go and search the house for the last coppers she needed.
In the store, she had seen countless other people just like her. Of no use to society, they were surplus to requirements. Not enough jobs, not enough houses and not enough food. The human race had taken over the Earth, and the Earth was no longer big enough to support so many people.
When the cashier served her, the notice above his head, advertising the lottery, caught her eye. The planet Karal. Filled with life and hope for the future. She knew the images weren’t real, only dreamed up by some advertising executive. No one from Earth had ever visited the alien planet and returned. In fact, the only human to have travelled to Karal was Elissa, last month’s lottery winner. The people of Earth only had the word of the aliens that she was still OK. Still alive.
A compulsion took over her and, as she paid for the bread, she also asked the guy serving her to scan her tag and enter her in the lottery. It was a new precaution, brought in to stop fraud; the tags held all her information. Name, age, race, that kind of thing, they were as unique as a fingerprint. He didn’t even look at her, simply aimed the wand in her general direction and clicked the button. Her name flashed up briefly on his screen and he pressed confirm. That was it. Her name was entered along with billions of others. The odds were high against her winning the lottery. The odds were always against her.
Walking home, she felt the weight of her life crushing her chest. Watching her parents struggle every day was heartbreaking. She helped as much as she could, cooking and cleaning, trying to take the strain off her mom, who at least had a job. But that didn’t put coins on the table.
Now, looking at their faces, she was instantly struck by how mistaken she had been. Food didn’t matter; you could go hungry and still survive. It was love that held them together and made this life worth living. She saw it reflected back in her parents’ faces, her sister and her brothers. She had tossed them all away to go and live on an alien planet with only one other human.
“I’m sorry,” she said. How could she have made things so much worse, by trying to make things better? She had disappointed her family once more. Only this time there was no way to make it up to them, because she would never see them again once she left for Karal.
“Don’t be silly,” her mom said, stepping forward and hugging her. “You will have a wonderful life on Karal. I can see why it is such a good choice for a young woman like you. We are so proud and pleased for you.”
“Mom, that’s not why I did it,” she said, throwing her arms around her mom, feeling the age-old comfort that mothers always passed to daughters.
Gone
. She had chosen to give up the very things that made her life happy.
Behind her, Micha, her younger sister sobbed quietly. Her brothers left the room, while her father made his way to the kitchen to put the kettle on. In that one small action, entering herself into the lottery she had ripped her family apart. Destroyed the one thing she had wanted to help preserve.
“Listen. I’ll speak to Mr Collier; perhaps he’ll let me have some coins in advance so we can buy you a pretty dress. Yes, that’s what we’ll do. Your picture will be beamed all over the world; can’t have our daughter going to another planet with people thinking her family can’t afford nice things.”
“Mom, no. I did this to help you, to make it so that you don’t have to be responsible for me for the rest of my life. I am going to be a burden to you and dad forever. They don’t need an agricultural engineer. There is no agriculture left. I was stupid.”
“You followed your dreams, Celia. When you began your course, you couldn’t have known the tornados would start. Agriculture was still viable.”
Large swathes of agricultural land had been ripped apart by huge tornados. The blasting in the hills, as they mined the last rock faces for resources, took the blame for these freak anomalies. All the mining had left the planet almost flat. With the crops destroyed, the next few months were going to be hard. It had been the final blow to Celia, but she had refused to simply walk away and had been one of a handful who even bothered to stay behind and finish her exams. Although her fears were confirmed: there would never be a job for her in agriculture.
“Oh, Mom, I’m going to miss you all so much.”
“We’ll still be here. Always. Maybe you can come back and visit.” Her mom—always filled with hope.
However, they both knew this was a one-way ticket. The Karals had never made any mention of a return trip. The females went to their new home to breed the next generation of Karalians. That was all they were expected to do.
The consolation was that the air was pure and the food plentiful. As her dad brought them tea—weak, because he had made the tea leaves, meant for one cup, stretch to four—she looked at them both and knew that she would never feel love like this again. Would never feel as if she belonged more than she did in this one moment.
As they sipped their tea, someone knocked on the door. Her dad went to answer it; there were words, raised words, and then the door slammed shut.
“How do they get here so fast?” he asked.
“Who was it, Dad?” she asked, scared it was a Karalian come to take her away already.
“Paps. Never really, felt sorry for those StreamStars before. But I think we are going to kiss goodbye to our privacy for the next day or so. Until you go.”
She had never seen her dad cry before, not really cry, but now he broke down, big, heaving sobs crushing him. All she could make out from his words were the fact that she was his baby and he couldn’t bear the thought of one of those men putting a child inside her.
If Celia had felt miserable on the day she entered the lottery, it was nothing compared to how bad she felt now. She held her dad as if he were the baby, their roles reversed. All the support they had given her felt wasted now; she had repaid them in the worst possible way. Instead of making things better, she had driven a stake through her dad’s heart, made him feel as if they had never been good enough for her, when in reality they had been the best parents a child could ever hope for in a ruined world.
Celia determined that she would do whatever she could to help them from afar. If she could earn some money for interviews in the short time before she left, then she would. This would be a new start and she would make it the best start she could.
But for now she let the pain and misery that filled the house wash over her. Tomorrow would be the day when she turned this around. It would probably be the day she met
her
alien for the first time. Sleep would be hard to find tonight. And for every night, for a very long time.
“It is done, the female has been chosen,” Torac said to the Hierarchy. He was struggling to keep his emotions in check. This idea had been repulsive enough to him when his ruler first suggested it, but a month ago, it had seemed so distant. Now he had seen the lottery take place on one of their damn infernal Streams, all flashing lights and neon colours projected on big screens in the street. Only when her face appeared did he realise this was his fate, and his fate was now. However, his emotions were his to control, and he would control them. Just as he would control her.
He had a plan, of course. No matter how much she tried to persuade him otherwise, he intended to put a child in her womb and send her to the breeding house, as was their tradition. He could never have her live with him all the time, not like that weak fool Marin. Marin was the first Karalian to take an Earth woman. He had fallen in love with her, whatever love for a human consisted of. Torac could never picture himself
wanting
to spend any more time than he had to with such a loud, selfish species.
This time, Karalian traditions would be upheld. He had to make sure that at the end of this first year all the women were sent to the breeding house. They had no place in Karal’s social structure. As Torac looked around the dirty, drab Earth, he knew that this was what his beloved planet would be like if they did not control the Earth women. Evil, that was how he saw all people of Earth, evil and corruptible.
He looked once more at the image of his new mate. The women were chosen because of their DNA and their ovulation cycle. His people had upgraded the tag system, which catalogued every human; they could now tell which females were suitable. Once their DNA was analysed they were put through to the next selection process: the females had to be fertile, they didn’t want to waste food on a barren female, and then their ovulation cycle was used to make the final selection. With any hope, he would only have to mate with her once or twice and then she
would
be sent away.