Suzanne had come from a pretty rough background. When she was only nineteen, she’d been tricked by an abusive boyfriend into becoming a drug mule. When she’d been caught, her boyfriend had thrown her under the bus completely and she wound up serving several years in prison. After that, she’d had a really hard time finding a job but she had worked in the prison kitchen and had some rudimentary skills.
Revealing all this in her interview to Jillian, she had broken down sobbing. Her rent was past due and if she didn’t find a job soon, she was going to be in trouble with her parole officer. She had begged Jillian to give her a chance and Jillian had—and she had never regretted it. Suzanne had worked her way up the kitchen hierarchy from dishwasher to line cook to Jillian’s personal sous chef and she had never once let Jillian down.
“Remember what you said to me during our interview?” Suzanne asked her. “You said, ‘everybody deserves a second chance.’ So let me give you one now, Jilly. You deserve to get away from this mess and start fresh. Come up to the Mother Ship with me and leave all this crap behind.”
With a mixture of relief and regret, Jillian had agreed. A week later, after wrapping up her life on Earth and quitting her job at The Palms before she could be fired, she stepped onto a Kindred shuttle driven by one of Suzanne’s new husbands and went up to the Mother Ship to start a whole new life.
2
And that’s how I ended up here—in this mess, Jillian thought to herself, staring at her accidental purchase and wondering what the huge bodyslave, still kneeling in the dust before her, was thinking.
Though honestly, it was a little more complicated than that. She could blame Brad for her choice to come to the Mother Ship in the first place, but the reason she had accidentally bought herself a bodyslave was because Pat-ar had won the right to host the Kindred High Council’s dinner with the Nebrian Ambassador.
Nebrians were notoriously picky eaters. Instead of a regular mouth, they had a long, curled proboscis like a butterfly, which had a pair of large, sensitive lips at one end. This meant that all of their food had to be either pureed, liquified, or powdered and served in long, thin vessels, so that they could suck it up with their curly mouth parts.
“And the thing they like best to eat is jumja soup flavored with thaelite,” Suzanne had told Jillian, when they were planning the VIP menu.
Jillian had frowned. She’d been working aboard the Mother Ship at Pat-ar for about two years at that point, and she’d learned a lot of new cuisines and handled a lot of exotic ingredients, but she’d never heard of thaelite.
“Thaelite?” she said. “What’s that?”
“It’s pretty expensive,” Suzanne admitted. “It’s the inner core of the Ruthian passion flower—or rather, it’s a lot of inner cores, all compacted into a really dense, solid mass. It takes millions of flowers to make a single brick of it, which is one reason it’s so expensive.” She shrugged. “But the Kindred High Council is picking up the bill and Commander Sylvan told me to buy whatever was necessary to impress the Ambassador. Apparently they have a deal on the table which could be really beneficial to the Kindred if it goes through.”
“Okay, no pressure then,” Jillian said dryly. But she wasn’t really worried—she was used to cooking for human VIPs—how different could aliens ones be? “So you need me to add a brick of thaelite to my weekly shopping list?” she asked. “Can I get it at the Buy-All-Sell-All Market?”
The huge food market—so named because you could get literally any ingredient in the galaxy there—was located a few solar systems away on Prius Six, a neutral planet which welcomed everyone, which was one reason the market had been established there. Jillian went there weekly to pick up the more exotic ingredients on Pat-ar’s menu.
At first she’d been nervous about going to a whole different planet by herself and one of Suzanne’s husbands had accompanied her. But then her friend’s twins were born—and turned out to be triplets instead. In addition to the Dark Twin and the Light Twin, Suzanne gave birth to a Shadow Twin—an extra baby that sometimes came along during Twin Kindred pregnancies.
After that, it had been all hands on deck at Suzanne’s suite. She needed both her husbands to help her out and between the three of them, they just barely managed the triplets, who were a real handful.
At that point, though, Jillian was much more comfortable with going to the market on her own. She couldn’t fly a Kindred spaceship, of course, but that had been solved by getting a small shuttle with an autopilot option.