John Ringo - Emerald Sea

“What’s that?”

“Think ‘school-girl look.’ ”

“Oh, is that what they used to wear in schools?” Shanea said, her eyes widening. “Were they harems, too?”

“Sometimes you have to wonder,” Megan frowned. “Sewing. Bleck.”

There had been a pair of cutting scissors in the room, chained to the shelves. Other than that they had small cutting blades about the size of her thumbnail to section the cloth. Megan noticed that she hadn’t seen anything resembling a knife or any serious bladed weapon in the whole harem. They had cut sections of cloth and headed back to their seat by Amber.

“What are you going to make?” Shanea asked.

Megan looked around at the other girls. Most of them simply wore the light robes that were provided, but a few had other items. One girl had a lovely blue pair of panties and bra with lace on the edges. But Megan knew that was far beyond her ability, even if she felt “right” wearing nothing but panties and a bra in public.

But she really wanted some support for her breasts. And something down lower would be good as well.

“I think… something to go around my top and bottom,” Megan said, then shook her head at Shanea’s incipient worried frown. “Nothing too… covering, damnit. Something that just covers the breasts, maybe buttoned. Just a few buttons. And pretty much the same thing on the bottom. If I can use those to figure out how to sew, I’ll look at making things like bras and panties.”

“Oh, those are hard ,” Shanea said, sadly. “Mine always look terrible. Only Mirta is that good. She’s so good nobody picks on her even if she isn’t one of Ashly’s friends.”

“Ashly?” Megan asked, picking up a length of heavy blue silk that rippled like water in her hands. “What about this?” she said, wrapping it around her breasts over the robe.

“Shorter,” Shanea said, darkly. “Narrower, whatever.”

“Great,” Megan snorted, folding the cloth almost in half. “They’re going to hang out the bottom if I go this narrow.”

“Trust me, go with narrow,” Shanea said. “If Christel thinks you’re trying to ‘cover up’ too much you’re not going to like it.”

“Got it.” Megan frowned. “Shorter. Now, Ashly,” she said, setting the cloth down and trying to figure out what to cut off. And how; the narrow cutters were hard to figure out.

“She’s the one playing backgammon,” Shanea whispered, gesturing carefully to the far side of the room where a tall, heavily built blonde was lying on her stomach looking at the board, one foot raised in the air and lazily waving back and forth.

“What about her?” Megan asked. She was trying to cut a straight line in the cloth and failing miserably despite going with the weave. The cutters were wooden crescents with two small blades embedded in them. When pressed into the edge of the fabric they would start a triangular cut and they maintained it well, as long as the fabric was kept taut. But when she’d stop to tighten the fabric the cut would waver. And it wasn’t particularly straight to begin with. She suspected her first effort was not going to be useable in public.

“She’s next after Christel,” Shanea said. “Christel doesn’t say that, but Ashly does, and she’s really mean. She’s the one that turned in Amber for talking about escaping. And she’s got some friends that help her. She’ll hurt you; she likes to hurt people.”

“Some people are like that,” Megan replied. I’m one of them. At least when I’m this angry. “So does she hurt you?”

“Not so much anymore,” Shanea said, sadly. “I just try to keep my head down and not bother anybody. Most of the time they don’t bother me. Mostly.”

Imprisonment experiments. Dad had talked about that one time, too. Take any random group of people. Make one side the “guards” and the other side the “prisoners.” Within weeks the guards are sadistic to the prisoners and the prisoners have separated into packs for mutual protection.

Something else about prison society. “It’s human society with all the stops off, honey. You have to establish that you’re not the bottom of the pecking order. And you have to establish that fast.”

Prisons were as much a part of the past as… well, war, come to think of it. But her father, it seemed sometimes, knew everything. And a lot of it he had passed on.

“Sometimes they want me to have sex with them,” Shanea continued. She had cut out a triangle of cloth and was contemplating it idly, as if thinking about something in the past. “It’s… sometimes it’s not so bad.”

“Shanea?” Megan said, gently.

“Yes?”

“Let me handle Ashly and her friends,” Megan said, then smiled, nicely.

“Don’t try to fight them,” Shanea said. “Christel doesn’t like fighting.”

“I’m sure it won’t get that far,” Megan replied. “Leave it to me.” She looked at the strip of cloth, then folded in an edge and wrapped it around her top again. “What do you think?”

“Narrower.”

“It will be when I’m done.” Megan sighed. She measured where it met in the front and then cut it off with some extra cloth in case she messed it up. Then she folded over one edge, which immediately unfolded.

“Pins,” Shanea said, handing her a handful. “Fold the edges and then pin them.”

“This is a pain,” Megan snapped.

“It passes the time.” Shanea shrugged. “There’s sewing, talking, bathing and playing board games. Except when Paul is here.”

“And then there’s getting raped,” Megan said, darkly.

“It’s really not that bad,” Shanea said. “Really. There’s nothing you can do to stop it, so just have as much fun as you can. Think of your boyfriend or something. Or girlfriend if you go that way.”

“Which is it for you?” Megan asked.

“Oh, I dunno,” Shanea smiled. “I think for fun, guys. For comfort, mostly girls.”

“And the only ‘guy’ is Paul,” Megan said.

“Yep.”

“What’s he like?” Megan asked, almost against her will. She told herself she was just gathering information about the enemy, but she knew she was lying. If she was going to spend the rest of her life “servicing” some guy, it made sense to recon the territory as well as possible.

“Not too big, thank goodness,” Shanea said with a shrug. “I kind of have to clamp down on him. Too quick. He really seems to think it’s just a duty.”

“Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.” Megan said, thinking that if it was “just a duty” a test tube and artificial insemination would work as well. Although, somewhere, she’d heard the term “live cover” which supposedly worked better. She shuddered at the thought. I’m a brood mare.

“Yep. ‘Oops, I gotta go now.’ And he switches around, too. I haven’t been with him in… a while. I mean, I don’t know how long. No way to tell time in here.”

“Does he just… arrive, do one of the girls and then leave?”

“Usually. Sometimes he stays for a while talking and then chooses another.”

“Just one of his myriad ‘duties,’ ” Megan snorted.

“I guess. And he’s looking worse and worse, too.”

“What do you mean?” Megan had gotten the edges pinned and took up one of the fine needles. Shanea had insisted on little needles for the silk and Megan found herself squinting at the hole, trying to get the incredibly fine thread to fit the even finer hole in the needle.

“Well you saw him,” Shanea said. She was apparently working on one breast piece of a bra and her movements were far defter than Megan’s.

“He looked old and worn out,” Megan said. “From the little I saw. But I thought that was a disguise?”