Queen & Commander (Book One of the Hive Queen Saga)

Chapter Two: Skill-crossed Lovers

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The moment he’d finished the Test, Victor hopped on his so-old-it’s-rusting bike and raced to the park to meet his secret girlfriend.

He knew how he’d Tested. Intelligence in the top half-percent. Skilled with computers. Creative. Predisposed to fixate on one worthy woman. The Test result he’d dreamed of since childhood. But that was before he’d met Gwyn.

Gods, Victor thought, I’m destined to be unhappy.

Tomorrow, the Senedd would tell him what he already knew. They’d provide all the best training. They’d make him a CreaTech who would one day Devote himself to the most brilliant and beautiful of Queens.

They’d send him away from here. Never to see Gwyn again. He choked on the melancholy.

He had to take advantage of this last chance to be together. She already knelt beneath their tree. Silent. Peaceful.

He dropped down beside her and rested his head resting in his girlfriend’s lap. He could only call her his girlfriend for a little longer before he’d have to find someone else. Someone society approved of. Someone who’d Tested as a Queen.

He stared into the canopy of five-pointed silver maple leaves above them while she soothed his hair. Will there even be trees wherever they send me?

He closed his eyes against the occluded sun and the veined leaves and the white-blonde hair that obscured his Gwyn’s face. He couldn’t look at his perfect world right now. Couldn’t bear to witness everything he’d be missing.

He wanted to be a CreaTech, to Devote. Of course he did! Who wouldn’t want to join the rarefied top classes of intelligentsia and happiness? But not at this price. Not if he had to lose this beautiful girl who knew everything about animals and cried for him whenever his father left on a long trip without saying goodbye.

Victor dug his fingers hard into the green grass, determined to drive them in so deeply that they’d strike rock. He wanted to bleed, to scream his agony. The pain would make more sense than this slow death in his heart.

Water fell down onto his forehead. Gwyn. He wrested dirt-crusted fingers from the ground and brushed them against her pale cheeks, smearing her perfect face with brown mud. Even in their shared pain, looking at her made his mouth tremble upwards and his lungs expand.

“Shh, shhh.”

He sat up to wrap Gwyn in his arms, chancing a brief hug. Their love had been hidden away from the world for the last two years, like water at the bottom of a core-deep well.

“We can find a way to be together. If not now, maybe in twenty years. I’ll be old enough then to have contact with women outside my Hive.”

She clutched at his shirt. Victor gave up on speaking. He rested his head on her silken hair, rubbing it with his cheek. It wasn’t fair! Why couldn’t Gwyn be a Queen? Why couldn’t he have both a Queen and a love? Gods knew his own often-absent father tried to have both. Though Dad spends more time with his Queen than with us.

She pushed back from him, Their eyes met, dull brown to greening hazel. Her nose scrunched, reddening already.

He had to make this better somehow. Victor leaned forward and slanted his mouth across hers. He wanted to fix things, to make her concentrate on the good they still had left. He wanted to eat her sadness until none remained.

Pressed against her, surrounded by tender sorrow, Victor didn’t notice the interloper until it was too late.

A throat cleared behind him. They’d been found out. His new university would be warned. They’d be told that he was defective, previously involved with a non-Queen. They’d whisper about him in the university halls. They’d never let him see Gwyn again, not even twenty years from now.