a Pleasure Rites, #1 by Ines Johnson (top ten books of all time TXT) 📗

It was Khial's first time out of the city. He'd wanted to see with his own eyes the ruins of man. Towers touched the sky with half of the face of the building gone. The land lay barren, dry. The few patches of green here and there was evidence of female animals who maintained the favor of the Goddess.

For the majority of the trip, Dain peppered the girl with questions about her origins, and how she came to be in the ruins. The girl only knew that her mother came from the city, the only remaining city on the northwestern continent. A few settlements remained in the southwestern hemisphere, where the land was more lush. The continent of Europa was nearly barren, as well as all of the northern Africas. That part of the world had been blown to bits by nuclear bombs and left mostly uninhabitable by the resulting radiation. The people who did survive fled to the islands of the Australias and Asia.

The girl chattered on, gazing at Dain with stars in her eyes. If the romance novels hadn't already decided Khial's mind about her, the stories the girl told of her mother confirmed Khial's conclusions. The girl's mother had been a female separatist, a small sect of women who believed the female gender were the chosen of the Goddess. Their aim was to complete Mother Nature's work by shutting out men from the cities and leaving them to their own devices to die out in the barren wilds of the earth. It was an illogical argument if you followed it to its conclusion: extinction. Khial did not argue it. He was happy to leave women to their own devices. So long as they left him to his.

It looked as though the girl's mother had been the only one of her sisterhood to put stock in the separatist beliefs and leave the city and its men. What the mother miscalculated was that fanaticism of the parent often leads the child in the opposite direction. Khial ran to the opposite end of his parents' ideologies, straight into Dain's arms. Straight into Dain's open home where laughter burst from each corner, and love flowed in abundance.

It appeared this girl ran from her mother's ideology as well, but more askew of it. Where her mother believed in the utter uselessness of men, the daughter, as it appeared from her reading fodder, believed men were meant to entwine themselves with women, inextricably, in the name of love. The problem was that she was trying to entwine herself into Khial's place of refuge.

The girl smiled demurely over her shoulder at Dain. As she turned, Khial's eyes caught the delicate curve of her neck. Fine hairs curled around her nape. The whimsy of those curls seemed out of place on a girl who felled and skinned a wild animal the day before. Khial's eyes dipped and met with the swell of one breast. She twisted in the seat and he saw the mound inside the flimsy cloth that barely covered her. The edge of a dark, brown nipple sent a shockwave to his dick and Khial lost control of the steering for a moment.

"You all right, Khi?" Dain asked from the back. "Do you need me to take over up there?"

Khial shook his head, eyes firmly on the road, hands gripping the wheel. No, Khial did not need his lover seated next to this temptress while he took a back seat.

They drove on in silence for some time. Dain dozed in the back. Khial kept one eye on his lover, looking for any signs of distress. When she wasn't gazing stupidly at Dain, the girl pressed her nose against the car window, awestruck at the devastation evident in the ruins of the previous society. A few times, both she and Khial leaned forward in unison to peer out the window at some wonder. Once, their shoulders met and she glanced at him with a small smile. Khial turned and spat out the window. She did not look at him again.

When Dain awakened sometime later, she gave all of her attention to him once more. Dain tried to bring Khial into their conversation, but Khial had no interest in getting to know the girl. His homespun mistrust of females aside, Khial knew the girl wouldn't be staying with them for much longer. So he grunted, shrugged, and then became mute, until Dain gave up.

By late afternoon, they'd reached the edges of the city.

The phallic skyscrapers and high-rises all fell in the Great Destruction. The domes that topped all structures of the surviving city rose no higher than two floors. Women believed that one must remain close to the earth. Solar panels, society's main power source, gleamed atop the domes, reminding Khial of a woman's tit. Steam rose in the air near the surrounding bodies of water, as an alternate to solar power. None of the cloying black soot from the use of coal and fossils of the 21st century remained on the outskirts of the city. No wires zigzagged across a skyline obscured by cell towers. Only radio communication and its short range waves were in use. Those waves only reached just beyond the borders of the city. There was little to no communication with other settlements outside the northern hemisphere.

Khial pulled up at the gates to the city. The peace officer glared when he saw a woman in the passenger seat. Women were far too precious to allow in harms' way, outside the city gates. Dain handed over his gold identification card and explained the situation, but the peace officer became more perturbed when he learned the girl had no identification, and was, in fact, being brought into the city for the first time.

By then, weary from the drive, Khial wanted to get home. He withdrew his platinum identification card and handed it over to the officer.

The officer did a double take. He turned, pointing at the platinum card. Two more sets of eyes