Dark Abyss by Kaitlyn O'Connor (top fiction books of all time txt) 📗

Caleb grunted. “She isn’t taken,” he said pointedly.

“No, but she didn’t volunteer to take any mutants on either.”

“Don’t you start that shit, too!”

“Ah … Simon reminded you that she didn’t seem too keen on mutants, huh?”

“Did she seem to you like she was … repulsed? Or she hated mutants?”

Joshua shrugged. “She seemed pretty fascinated with Simon’s ass … or maybe his back, but I’m thinking ass. I suppose she might’ve been staring at the fins, though. I didn’t see anything on her face that looked like revulsion, but I have to tell you I’ve got my own doubts she’ll go for it. I don’t think she hates mutants—not like her father does.

She just isn’t that kind of person, to my thinking, and I think she was all right with us once she discovered we weren’t going to hurt her, but that doesn’t mean she likes any of us. Or that she might feel more than like. If she’d put herself on the market, we’d at least know that she was willing to settle with mutants. As it is, all we do know for certain is that she doesn’t approve of the practice and it seems to me that that means she won’t be easy to convince to make the change.”

“That doesn’t mean she can’t be convinced,” Caleb said doggedly.

“That’s going to be hard to do from out here,” Joshua retorted wryly.

“That’s why I don’t plan on staying out here.”

Joshua stared at him. “Man you’ve got it bad! You’re going to risk suspension or worse?”

“I could use a little vacation time … maybe I’ll spend it with Anna.”

Joshua thought it over a moment and grinned. “I haven’t had a vacation in a while if it comes to that.”

Chapter Six

Anna began to feel the beginnings of deep depression as soon as the glow from Caleb’s kiss began to wear off. Shaking herself, she headed to her garden to check on her plants since she hadn’t been able to in several days. To her relief, the automatic drip feed hadn’t let her down. The plants were still hardy and had burgeoned with a bumper crop of the nutritious but horribly nasty produce.

Heading back into her kitchen, she grabbed a large bowl and went back into the garden to pick what seemed to be ripe. When she’d washed them, she remembered she’d been looking for a recipe that might make the food more palatable before she’d been whisked off to the magical land of mermen. Deciding there was no sense in completely giving up on the still unnamed vegetable she’d invented before she’d at least tried cooking it every way she could think of, she settled to looking for recipes again.

She didn’t actually have a lot of them in her book, though, that she thought were worth a try and when she saw she’d already tried most of the promising ones, she went to her media center and connected with the net to look up others.

She started with the fish, since Paul had pointed out that it had a faintly fishy taste—which it did—which led her to Atlantis since the territorial fish farms were now the biggest supplier of the fish distributed in the U.S. She hesitated. After a few moments indecision, instead of pursuing the recipes that had brought her to research the net to start with, she veered off to see what sort of information was available. It wasn’t until the light came on in the living area that she realized she’d been sitting in front of her media center for hours.

The board of tourism and colonization had offered far more information than anything else she’d found, although she suspected, like most places, their main objective was to make the spot as enticing as possible. It had pretty much glossed over the customs she’d found so unsettling beyond comparing it to a nudist colony.

It was certainly that, she thought as she headed to the kitchen and began chopping up some of the ‘franken-veggies’! Not that it didn’t make perfect sense! As disturbing as she’d found it, she could see the reasoning behind it. It was a matter of practicality.

She supposed that was one of the main reasons why people tended to dismiss the territory as a wild, uncivilized, decadent place—because they didn’t have enough sense, or just didn’t care, that the custom had evolved out of purely practical considerations.

The marriage practices were another matter! After reading all about it, she was obliged to admit that that, too, had clearly evolved from necessity, and she still found it shocking—intriguing, but scandalous!

It just supported her case, though! If times weren’t so hard people wouldn’t feel compelled to help to support their families by placing themselves on the Atlantis marriage market for sale! It was sad, really, for everyone concerned. Sad to think the colonists were so desperate for families, for women, that they paid a fortune for them and sad to think the women’s families were so financially crippled that they had to offer up their daughters just to survive!

Her genetically engineered food would go a long way toward solving some of the worst problems, she knew … if she could ever get it right. The recipe she finally decided on was a complete disaster, though!

Shuddering after her first bite, she set her fork down and studied the casserole speculatively, wondering if the vegetable was that salty or if she’d just added too much salt. She really hadn’t noticed that the vegetable tasted salty when she’d tried it before, though.

Of course, she’d barely stuck her tongue to it.

Taking another out of the cooling unit, she sliced a piece off and popped it into