Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
“Well, hello there, pretty little one!” he growled, waving the bloody cleaver at her by way of a greeting. “If it isn’t my ‘second bride’—the one V’rex almost gave up to me by refusing to brand her!”
“What are you talking about?” Penny demanded, stepping closer to the butcher’s stall. “He branded me at the Unification Ceremony—everybody saw it.”
“Yes he did, though not properly.” Skrug frowned. “But he didn’t want to—no he didn’t! Put up such a fuss about it when our Glorious Leader was explaining how things would go before we started that he nearly lost you as his bride. The Shining Star was actually going to give you to me, you know.” He leered meaningfully at Penny. “Until V’rex finally agreed to do the deed.”
“He was?” Penny remembered how upset the big Hybrid had been about having branded her and how insistent he’d been about healing her. Clearly Kat and Commander Sylvan had been at least partially wrong about him—he didn’t want to hurt women like a full-blooded Kru’ell One.
“Oh yes, the Glorious Leader was this close to giving you over to me.” Skrug poked a bloody thumb in his own aproned chest, which was already smeared with red and brown stains. “Pity he didn’t. Old Skrug would have treated you right, so I would! Just ask Shurla—I made her almost too sore to walk last night and I’ll do it again tonight!” He laughed uproariously, then leaned over the counter to stare at Penny lasciviously. “I can breed you too, pretty one, if V’rex isn’t doing you right. You just say the word and I’ll come around this counter and give it to you right proper!”
The thought of being bred by the huge, blue-skinned, hunchbacked, snaggletoothed alien made Penny want to vomit. Beneath his butcher’s apron she could see his massive equipment swinging, like one of the fat sausages dangling from the ceiling of his shop.
“No thank you,” she said, stepping away from him. “I…I have to get to my job.”
“Oh? And where’s that?” Skrug looked interested.
“None of your business,” Claudette, who had been standing silently by until now, snapped. “Come on, Penny.”
She grabbed Penny by the arm and dragged her down to the next stall, which happened to be the bakery.
“This is it?” Penny hissed in her ear. “Right beside the butcher’s shop?”
“Can’t be helped,” Claudette muttered back. “Now put on a smile, Penny and remember to act the part.”
Penny knew there was no other choice. Pasting a big grin on her face, she walked through the outside area of the bakery, where stacks of fresh loaves of a dusky pale purple color were on display, and into the back of the shop.
It was much darker in the inside of the shop and at least fifteen degrees hotter. As soon as her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, Penny saw why. There were several huge brick ovens all ranged along the back wall and all of them appeared to be running simultaneously. Their glowing interiors looked like traditional pizza ovens to Penny and loaves of bread were being shoveled in and out of them constantly by the many workers.
Lined up along the other two walls were tables with plenty of busy women. Some were mixing huge vats of flour and water and yeast with vast wooden paddles while others were kneading and pounding the dough. The fresh dough and the baking bread perfumed the air with a delicious, yeasty scent that Penny inhaled deeply.
“There’s your supervisor,” Claudette said to her in a low voice. She nodded at a NeverBreeder who was whacking and yanking roughly at an enormous mound of bread dough, as though it had done something to personally displease her.
“It is?” Penny looked at the stern-looking NeverBreeder uncertainly.
“Uh-huh. That’s Head Baker Goone.” Claudette’s voice sounded grim. “You need to stay on the right side of her if you don’t want to be recycled, so be respectful. Come on.”
She led Penny down the rows of tables until they reached the little orange supervisor who had surprisingly big muscles in her short arms—probably from pounding the dough like she was. Her biceps bulged like someone had shoved two naval oranges into an orange sock.
It seemed strange to assign sexes to the NeverBreeders and it wasn’t exactly accurate, but some of them just seemed more female or more male. Maybe it was a manifestation of the sex they would have been if they hadn’t been taken as three-month-old fetuses and dunked in the chemical baths that robbed them of their sex and their reproductive ability and turned them into orange mutants, Penny thought.
At any rate, Head Baker Goone certainly put out an angry kind of female energy as she pounded the helpless dough. Penny hoped as they stepped up to her table that she could, as Claudette had put it, get on her “good side.”