Bree may be away healing, but she has left behind a thank you gift! For the next few weeks, Tuesdays & Thursdays will feature new posts from a serial featuring some old friends. This serial was originally posted (mostly!) on Patreon, and has been edited and finished to be posted live on our blog over the next few weeks. But for those who just want it NOW, or who hate reading on a blog and would like an epub… Well here is the epub!
Return to the world after the Beyond Series and meet the residents of Sector Three…
When Ashwin asks Six & Bren to take in an emotionally fractured Makhai soldier, there are a thousand things that could go wrong. But they are hard at work building their school and rebuilding their sector, and Sebastian is a genius who can fix anything. Anything. In return for his help, all they have to do is give him a safe place to find out if his emotional wounds can be healed.
Just one traumatized supersoldier in the middle of a school filled with former feral street kids, war refugees from exclusive brothels, and a few dozen kids who barely know what a school is.
What could go wrong?
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DISCLAIMERS: this is a serial meant for existing readers of the series. it contains full series spoilers for the Beyond Series and may not make sense if you haven’t read it.
It is also NOT erotic. This is the first part of a very very very slow burn romance between a broken Makhai soldier and an artist who escaped Sector Two after the bombings. There may also be a few other romances a brewing… consider this more like a TV show with multiple members of the cast up to hijinks, even if there are two main characters.
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People had strange ideas about endurance.
Leah lowered herself to the floor, stretched out on her toes, her palms spread flat against the uncomfortably cold tile. She kept her movements slow and tightly controlled, just as she’d been taught. After all, jerky movements weren’t very graceful, were they?
She almost grimaced at the thought. Instead, she kept her expression serene, relaxed, with a tiny smile playing at the corners of her lips.
Just as slowly, she began to shift her weight. When she was bearing it entirely on her hands, she lifted her toes from the floor. She wobbled for a moment, then balanced, and her smile turned into a real one.
At least she’d kept up her core strength. It was important for so many things valued at Orchid House–posture, skillful dancing, overall fitness.
The ability to take a punch to the gut without dropping.
The idea flitting practically, casually, through Leah’s head would horrify most of the other teachers at Sector Three’s tiny school. None of them seemed to remember that she’d come from the Flower District, much less that she’d been an Orchid, for Christ’s sake.
Or maybe they’d never been able to wrap their brains around that fact in the first place.
The muscles in Leah’s arms began to tremble. Her abs and her back burned.
She held steady.
From what she’d learned in her research about Three, most of its residents understood trauma as well as anyone. They’d lived it, but in an overt, visceral way. An ugly one. Their trauma looked like shattered factories, crumbling tenements, weeping children whose mothers turned to sex work to keep them from starving.
Leah’s mother had sold her into sex work instead, traded her for a year’s wages and the promise of a better life for her only daughter.
The trainers at Orchid House had kept that promise, after a fashion. Leah had never been hungry, or cold, or lacked medical care when she was ill. She’d never lived on the street, been forced to band together with other kids just to share the intel and supplies and skills necessary to survive.
No, her trauma looked much different. It had been full of hand-to-hand combat training interwoven with lessons on comportment, etiquette, and psychological manipulation. Perfectly coiffed hair, luxurious spa treatments, dazzling parties, whispers about the best way to defuse a man’s anger so that he let go of your throat instead of strangling you.
How could anyone here see her trauma, when she’d been trained to hide it so well?
She’d held her position for so long that her arms were on the verge of collapse. But she forced herself to lower position back to the floor in a controlled motion. Always controlled.
She released a shaky breath and rolled to her back. Everyone in Sector Three could think she was naïve, perhaps even a bit vapid. It was better than having them know the truth.
If Leah didn’t keep herself under control, she’d fly apart.