Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
The matrons handled the children with the calm authority of women who had seen every possible configuration of maternal awkwardness and exhaustion. Between the mœðr and the matres they made a small, efficient republic of female care under the ice.
For a little while, absurdly, it felt almost ordinary. We sat. We talked. Camille corrected her daughter in French and English by turns. Mary let her son clutch at the braid over her shoulder. Lorna accepted tea she clearly did not want but which a matron had decided she required. I found myself telling them, at their insistence, about my first sight of Athena Station in the hangar, and Camille laughed at my impressionability, when I admitted how dramatic an impression the sight had made on me.
Then the summons came.
A matron in charcoal gray appeared in the doorway with the expression of someone delivering an order from an unquestioned superior power. “The masters are ready for the girls.”
No one argued. That, more than anything, seemed to define our lives now: not constant coercion, but the steady existence of a framework within which our compliance had already become built in. We rose. We kissed children, handed them back, smoothed our clothes.
We had dressed casually for the nursery: soft trousers, sweaters, ordinary bras and underwear, socks, flats. Civilian womanhood. It lasted exactly until the threshold back toward the men’s section.
There a second matron waited beside a bench and a row of hooks. She gave the instruction in the same neutral tone. “Clothing off here, girls.”
Camille sighed like a radical forced to acknowledge gravity. “Of course.”
So we undressed together without fuss, because fuss would only have made it more humiliating. Sweaters over heads. Waistbands stepped out of. Bras unclasped. Panties lowered. Socks peeled away. One by one we laid the garments in labeled baskets and stood naked in the warm air of Project Athena’s female checkpoint, each of us marked by our own recent history.
Camille was magnificent in the blunt, fertile way of late pregnancy, breasts heavy, belly huge and taut, dark triangle between her thighs, body made royal by her master’s use. Lorna, paler and slimmer, had only the first tenderness of change, but that made her beauty no less striking; indeed the slight roundness low on her abdomen gave her aristocratic severity a strange softness. Mary, with her red hair and the sweet traces of youth motherhood had not erased, looked to me as she always did now: both companion and temptation.
And I—still slim, still not visibly altered, but no longer innocent even to myself—felt heat flood my face as I looked at them. Their nakedness affected me not only with comparison and embarrassment but with desire. Giovanna and Henrik had forced open that chamber in me. I knew now, with a seriousness that still startled me, how much I wanted women as well as men. Beauty in another bed thrall translated itself into hunger to kneel with her, taste her, be tasted, be arranged by masculine hands for mutual use. Standing there among them under the Arctic ice, I had the sudden treacherous thought that I would have liked very much to be sent not to a conference room but to a bed.
Mary caught my eye and smiled faintly, as if she read enough in my blush to tease me later. Camille noticed too, because Camille noticed everything.
“Poor Ilsa,” she said. “Someone’s education has been revealing.”
I made a little helpless sound, which only amused her more.
Then we went on, naked and barefoot, through heated corridors toward the conference room, accompanied by the quiet dignity of the matrons. The facility’s personnel did not stare. That somehow made it more complete. We were simply expected, catalogued, and in our proper state for the men whose work this was.
The conference room itself combined the aesthetics of a boardroom, a war room, and a cult chamber. Screens. Data tables. Steel. Dark wood. A long central display waited under recessed lights, its surface alive with maps, schematics, and columns of numbers that would have looked at home in any multinational planning session if not for the fact that the women who entered had no clothes on.
The men were already seated or standing in positions that made hierarchy obvious without anyone needing to announce it. Sven at the head. Henrik near him, one hand resting on the back of a chair. Aksel by one of the displays. Erik with his heavy quietness. Matthew a little apart, like a soldier attached to diplomacy. Giovanna seated with a tablet before her, dark and immaculate and not in the slightest diminished by being the only woman on the clothed side of the arrangement.
Sven did not waste time.
“What Ilsa and Mary saw,” he said, “and what the subsequent cross-checking has suggested, has altered our understanding of the geopolitical situation.”
Aksel touched the display. The surface changed. A map of global energy corridors appeared, then a cluster over eastern China, then ownership charts, shipping routes, and more data I could only partly absorb at a glance.