Alien Tango

“That’s it,” Claudia said, and she was furious. “I’ve had it. If they think they can do this to Jeff, then they think they can do this to all of us.”
    “Will the rest of your generation really do what the older A-Cs tell you?”
    “We have to. We all swore to obey the Pontifex’s rules.” Claudia was shaking, she was so angry. “They made us promise before we realized it meant we’d have to marry whoever they said.”
    “Why don’t you break those promises? Why doesn’t anyone rebel?” I mean, it wasn’t the olden days.
    They all looked at me with a sort of horror in their expressions. Okay, this was a biggie. “We promised,” Lorraine said slowly. “We . . . can’t just break those promises.”
    Claudia and Doreen both nodded. “We’d be excommunicated,” Doreen said. She sounded as though this was the worst thing in the world. Okay, for the A-Cs, it was the olden days. “We also have nowhere to go.” She swallowed. “But I don’t care anymore.”
    “We have to find a way out,” Lorraine agreed. “All of us.”
    I thought about what my mother had warned me about and the biggest reason I wasn’t pushing for Martini to leave—medical. “Can enough of your generation do medical work?”
    Lorraine nodded. “Almost all of us, women, anyway. And we can train anyone who can’t.”
    “How many are at the point Doreen is, where they just don’t care about breaking that promise any more?”
    Lorraine and Claudia looked at each other. “Probably everyone,” Lorraine said finally, though she didn’t sound confident. “There’s been a lot of . . . talk about what you just said, Kitty. That we should maybe think about breaking a promise that we gave before we understood all the ramifications.”
    “If I could get the Pontifex to say that no one would be excommunicated, would that change things?”
    “Absolutely,” Claudia said. The others nodded. “If you can get that confirmed, everyone would break that stupid
    ‘only marry within the A-C race’ promise, or at least everyone who wants to marry a human would.”
    “Good. Then we get out. It’s called total rebellion. We find someplace where we can all live, like Dulce, only ours, and we go there. With our mates, whatever race they may be. And, if we have A-Cs who want to support this even if they don’t want to do it themselves, them, too.”
    “We do,” Lorraine said firmly.
    “And we do it now.”
    “I’m in,” Claudia and Lorraine said in unison.
    “Me, too,” Doreen said. “And all my friends are in, too.”
    “It’ll be better for both races, in the long and short run. Are you sure you can detach from your parents, though?”
    “I can’t wait to get away from them,” Doreen spat out. “They don’t care about what I feel or what I want. It’s all ‘good of the race’ and ‘you have to.’ Never any thought about what might be good for me .”
    I’d known the younger A-Cs were angry, but I hadn’t realized they were already past furious and living in Rage Central. Fury was useful, but I didn’t want the A-C community fighting itself. There were too many other factions trying to wipe them out.
    Before I could say anything, Lucinda and Alfred joined us. “I’m not marrying Jeff!” Doreen shouted, loudly enough to be heard in the family room, I was pretty sure. She moved behind me. I realized she was afraid they were going to try to drag her off somewhere.
    “This is ridiculous.” I took a deep breath. “Kevin!”
    The men must have been listening in, not that it would have been hard to miss. Kevin ran to me. “What’s up?”
    “Kevin, please contact the head of the Presidential Terrorism Control Unit. Ask her to advise the President that we have political refugees. I’m not sure how many, could be hundreds, might be thousands. They’re asking for protection from the United States Government due to religious persecution.”
    Kevin pulled his phone out. “On it.”
    “Stop.” Lucinda’s voice was quiet. Kevin didn’t stop dialing. “No, don’t do this.”
    I got right up into her face. “You want to go head-to-head with me? No problem. I stared down your murderous father and his fugly alter ego. And I helped kill them. Without a moment’s remorse. I killed that bitch Beverly who was torturing and attempting to murder Jeff. And I have more remorse about using her head as a softball—and I have no remorse for that—than I do about pissing you the hell off. You pose no terrors for