Chapter Five

His wife-to-be crept into his unit like she was tiptoeing through a minefield. He'd been feeling trapped, and patience was not his best trait, but an uncharacteristic sympathy stirred as he considered the situation from her perspective. They both were entering into a marriage of convenience with alien strangers, but at least he got to remain on his home planet. She had left her world and everything familiar behind. Judging from her reaction to the accelerator and the vaporator—aspects of daily life he took for granted—Terra Nova had nothing similar. Caradonia must seem incredibly foreign to her.

Her astonishment had aroused his curiosity about her planet. He would ask her about it after they got the important issue settled.

While her entering into their arrangement affected only her, what he did impacted all his people. He had more at stake than wasting a year of his life tied to an unwanted wife .

"Feel free to look around while —feel free to look around," he amended. He'd been about to say, while you're here . That would have sounded like she would only be here for a brief visit, and the marriage needed to last the full year. When she learned their arrangement had a definite expiration date, she might decide to cite the "bad faith" clause and demand a different mate. As the face of Cosmic Mates, he had to be married, visible, and make the program look appealing, so men would sign up.

Her gaze focused on the sky outside the window as she stepped down into the round sunken seating area. Cushioned sectional white sofas encircled the inside perimeter, intersected at two intervals by entry steps. He touched a hidden button on a sofa back, and a half-moon table rose out of the golden-veined floor in front of one of the sections.

Hope jumped.

"There's one table for each section," he said.

There was nothing else in the expansive room.

"Your parlor is very…"

"Stark?" he suggested. Before the pandemic, he'd overheard a former female guest describe his place as cold and austere, although she may have been referring to him .

"I was going to say minimalist."

"It is," he agreed. The sparseness was soothing to him.

On the planet's surface, there was too much of everything. People crowded into squalid makeshift shelters sandwiched among the cloudtoppers. Vermin teemed among piles of refuse. Walkways were so pitted with potholes they looked bombed. Odorous smells assaulted the nose, and noise hammered the ears. Everywhere there was banging, clanging, shouting, wailing. Ubiquitous megacomms blared and flashed government directives everyone ignored and product advertisements few could afford.

Surface life had improved—he'd made it better as soon as he'd climbed his way up to governor-general—but the experience of having been born a surface dweller had burned a permanent scar on his psyche.

"What a view!" Crossing the seating area, she made a beeline for the wall of glass. The sky was the only artwork he needed, displaying brilliant swaths of tangerine, mauve, and scarlet at sunrise and sunset. Even during the day, the picture varied—sometimes gray, sometimes cloud-white, often bright blue, and then, at night, deep black .

His unit was so high in the sky, city lights weren't visible until you looked down. Then they sparkled, creating beauty out of ugliness, a clear reminder of how distance affected perception. Sometimes, at night, he'd sit in the seating pit, roll back the ceiling, and gaze at the stars.

As she drew closer to the window, the floor turned transparent and seemed to vanish beneath her feet. She let out a scream and leaped back.

"Sorry, I should have warned you," he said. "Are you okay?"

"I thought I was going to fall." She pressed a hand to her chest and crept to the edge of the floor as if peeking over a precipice.

From this distance, the city appeared tiny, insignificant, but if you were ensnared by it, it amounted to a huge, sprawling tangled web you had to fight to break free of. "It is like being on top of the world! How high up are we?" she asked.

She wouldn't understand their units of distance. He did a quick, rough calculation. "About two and a half kilometers. This cloudtopper is the tallest building in all of Caradonia. The next tallest building in this province is about two kilometers high. We build up. It allows for an efficient use of space." But the buildings also blocked the sunlight. Surface dwellers lived in the shadows.

"The floor is solid, right?"

"As an asteroid."

She tapped the transparency with her foot before stepping onto it and inching to the window looking down over the city's cloudtoppers and the surface. "This is enough to give me vertigo. Is the spaceport in one of the skyscrapers?"

He nodded. "Yes. But you can't see it from here. Come with me, and I'll show you where you'll be sleeping."

He led her to the second largest of the four bedrooms. An expansive bed covered in white silky fabric backed up against a padded headboard facing a wide window, perfect for viewing the ever-changing sky. "My room is down the hall," he said matter-of-factly, answering the question he assumed would be on her mind. They would not be sharing a room. Theirs would be a marriage in name only for the duration.

She nodded. He couldn't tell if she was relieved or not.

Two huge vases of summer blooms identical to the ones in his lobby stood beside the bed, one on each side .

She moved to the vases and cupped a flower in her hands. Her face lit up with a genuine smile, and she seemed to glow with happiness from the inside out. She likes flowers. His heart gave a funny little hitch. "I had them brought in along with the ones in my lobby."

A little crease appeared between her brows.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

"No. The flowers are…perfect like the ones in the lobby," she said.

He'd added them in her bedroom, trying to be as welcoming as he would be to any guest, without giving her the wrong idea. The conversation they needed to have weighed on his mind. I should have told her already.

"Wardrobe and bath are here." He touched a wall, and a spacious corridor lined by closets opened up. He set her bag—which he still held—inside the closet. She tiptoed past him to peek into the bath and then turned around. Her brows drew together in a frown. "What did you mean by your lobby? You said you had flowers brought into your lobby."

"Yes, this is true," he said, not understanding.

"It's not a shared space? With other tenants, owners? "

"No, it is not a shared space. It is my private entrance. I own the top floor of this cloudtopper."

She blinked. "Oh…what exactly do you do to earn a living?"

"That is one of the things we must discuss. You need to understand my position. If you've seen enough here, let's go into the other room."

In the living area, he gestured for her to take a seat and then sat a cushion away. She angled toward him, her too-large dress slipping off one shoulder but covering her knees, which were pressed together. She looked tense, scared actually, and her trepidation pricked at his conscience. Since leaving the office to pick her up, he'd been grappling for a tactful, easy way to let her down without hurting her feelings.

"I can't give you what you came for," he said bluntly. "Our marriage will be temporary, terminating at the end of the provisional period. I'm sorry if you had counted on a lasting commitment. I cannot give you that."

His announcement met with dead silence. Then she let out a huge sigh, followed by a choking laugh. "That's it?" She pressed a hand to her chest. "That's what you wanted to tell me? I was afraid you were disappointed and were going to reject me. "

"No," he said. "I intend to live up to the terms of the contract."

"Your terms are acceptable to me," she said.

"They are?"

"It's a relief. My intention is to leave at the end of the provisional period, too."

"Why come all this way if you're not open to seeing it through?" It wasn't that he felt rejected or hurt; he was curious, that's all. Marriage was a commitment; you didn't try it on like a new shirt to see if it fit. You made your selection and then made it work. For most people, that was. Not him. He was the exception.

"Why did you?" She turned the question back on him.

"I enrolled in Cosmic Mates to set an example for my people, to encourage them to enroll."

"Your people?" She arched her eyebrows.

"The Caradonians. I'm governor-general. When I say, ‘my people,' I refer to the citizens."

Her eyes widened, and for a moment, she was silent. Then, "Why is Cosmic Mates so important?"

"You may have noticed how few females were at the spaceport. It is that way all over the planet. Two years ago, women of childbearing age were infected with a nano-virus. The pandemic killed millions—"

Eyes ablaze, she leaped to her feet. "Wait a minute! You brought me—and other unsuspecting women—here where we could be infected by a virus and die?"

"No, you are immune. It only affects Caradonian females and only those in their prime."

"How do you know?"

"Because that was one of the first things we tested. It was one of the tests you received in Medical on the ship, just to verify. We would never endanger anyone else."

Her eyes narrowed. "What else did you test for?"

"We checked that you didn't carry a contagion that could be harmful to us—we don't need another pandemic—and you were injected with a translator chip, which included auxiliary programming enabling you to use our electronics and technology."

"Like vaporators, accelerators, and doors?"

"Exactly."

She sank onto the sofa again. "Caradonia needs women."

"We lost half of our child-bearing-aged female population. The remainder cling to life in stasis pods. Even if we develop a cure, the damage has been done. Our species can't recover from this unless we start producing children soon."

"That still doesn't explain why you are not in it for the long-term."

"I have no desire to bond—ever. I am not capable of forming close attachments. If I were capable of loving—but I am not—it would interfere with my mission to help my people." Up until the pandemic, he'd been creating upward mobility opportunities for the surface dwellers. Then came the decimation of the female population, and he'd had to shift time and resources to the crisis.

He strategized, prioritized, and planned. He met with advisors, kept his people informed, and tried to sound encouraging. But the problem seemed so overwhelming, it left him numb, like he'd been placed in a stasis pod. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt alive.

"It's not in me to love another person. I am not husband material. It would be wrong to inflict my company on any woman. I would be cold company."