CHAPTER FOUR

 

The acceptance letter was waiting in her profile inbox when she woke up the next morning. Thisbe couldn't contain her joy, squealing with unrestrained delight as she danced around the room, jumping on the bed a few times before collapsing into the downy blankets and shouting a muffled shriek into her pillow.

“Yes! Thank you, Sean, you lonely old bastard! I'm doing it! I'm really getting away from them!”

According to the attached instructions, she was to report to the Edinburgh matchmaker's office the next morning promptly at six for paperwork processing and to pick up her travel credentials. From there, she would take a shuttle back to London and board the next gateway launch to Sirona. Then it would be several days of space travel before she arrived at her new home and her new life, living in wedlock to a man old enough to be her grandfather.

Survivors do what they need to do, she told herself, suppressing a shiver. Sean had been clear in his profile that he wasn't looking for some young sexy thing to play house with. He was just a bored, lonely old man looking for someone to talk to. At worst, he'd probably expect her to listen to him drone on about stories of his younger days or admire his prized tomato plants in the summer. How bad could it really be?

Thisbe pursed her lips as her imagination took over and wished she hadn't asked herself that. Instead, she forced herself to turn her attention to the rest of the instructions. She was to pack lightly, bringing only a suitcase's worth of belongings. There would be limited space for personal items on the shuttle, and pets were absolutely not allowed. Well, no problems there at least.

She spent the rest of the day shopping for a few travel-friendly outfits online, eating room service, and looking up everything she could about her new home. Sirona was about half the size of Earth, but it was a vibrant, thriving world nonetheless. There were different ecosystems and climates, just like her home world. From what she gathered, the area around Sean's farm was sunny, warm, almost sub-tropical. He said he grew coffee, mostly. She glanced wistfully out the window at the autumn rain and tried to cheer herself up.

It's not like I'm going to be his prisoner. Vacations are a thing that people do. Yearly, even!

By the end of the day, she had a small ensemble consisting of several colorful sundresses, shorts, breathable cotton safari shirts, sandals and flirty heels, a sun hat, new sunglasses, and a fun swimsuit delivered to her hotel room door by courier.

Trying everything on cheered her up immensely, but not enough to fully get rid of that feeling like her parents knew exactly where she was, what she was doing, and were just waiting for their moment to swoop in and dash her entire plan to pieces. It would be just like them.

But the evening passed uneventfully and by five the next morning, Thisbe was showered, dressed, and made up into some semblance of bland, inoffensive prettiness. She hoped she would pass for an anonymous young woman looking for opportunity and love on the moon.

The Happy Hearts matchmaker's office was a beige corporate affair. She sat awkwardly in a fluorescent-lit waiting room decorated with fake flowers where a sleepy receptionist offered her a cup of tea from a machine, which Thisbe declined. She already felt like a bundle of nervous energy and didn't think the extra caffeine would do anything to help that. Even though she was the only one there at that hour, it still took ages for them to call her name and direct her to a desk in the middle of an antiquated open office.

The assigned blonde case processor gave her an assessing stare over the rims of his eyeglasses for one long, heart-stopping moment, and Thisbe was sure she’d been recognized. Then he seemed to suddenly flip some sort of internal perky switch and smiled up at her, gesturing to the seat across from him.

“So! You're off to Sirona, huh?” Thisbe settled into the seat on the other side of the desk and nodded.

“That's right! I always did hope to live far from my hometown,” Thisbe lied.

“Well, you can't get much farther than this,” the man laughed at a joke he’d likely told five thousand times before. Thisbe managed a tight-lipped smile. “Alright, let's get started and get you on your way! First, I'll have you read over and sign the standard contract.”

The contract was about what Thisbe had expected, from the disclaimers and terms and conditions she had agreed to on their website. They paid her way to Sirona if and only if she showed up to her betrothed's homestead and they signed a marriage contract within five days of her arrival. If not, she would owe them the full sum of their expenses getting her there, plus any extra legal fees Happy Hearts might accrue whilst hunting her down.

According to the contract, it cost them six hundred thousand and change for her ticket. That was a hefty sum, and it was further backed up by vague but polite insinuations that bounty hunters might be brought in to find any runaway brides, should she not check in on time. Thisbe signed it quickly, before she could change her mind and go crawling back to her parents in defeat. At least Sean Kerridan seems to have no interest in forcing a baby on me.

“Perfect!” Chirped the processor. “Let's see here... can I have some I.D. please?”

“Of course.” Thisbe searched around in her new purse and pulled out five thousand pounds in cash. She slid it across the desk to the man and smiled evenly at him. “Here you go. I think this is it.”

This was the riskiest part of her plan. The case processor looking down at her hand was a total stranger, and it was a huge risk to his job to accept a bribe from her. She had no way of knowing if this would be enough money to cover that risk for him, or if he were the sort of person who didn't have enough trouble in his life to be swayed by cash.

There was a long pause that seemed to go on for a lifetime. Had every single noise in the office stopped at once, or had Thisbe just gone temporarily deaf? She couldn't hear anything, not even her heartbeat as it throbbed in her ears. At last, the man put his hand over the cash and made it disappear into a side-drawer in his desk.

“Thank you, yes, that's perfect,” he said with a tight smile.

He punched in a few more words here and there, clicked through a series of checkboxes, then handed Thisbe a digital stylus.

“Okay, Ms. Jackson, we'll just need your signature to make this official and I'll get your ticket and temporary passport all set up!”

“And... the marriage certificate?”

“Oh, we don’t process those Earthside. That will be up to you and your lucky fiancé to figure out once you get to your new home,” he explained.

He pulled out a glossy, colorful pamphlet and set it in front of her. So You're Starting A New Life on Sirona, it read in big, swirly letters above a photo of a hand caressing a rose.

“Here, this guide covers the basics. We also have an app you can download!”

“Thanks,” Thisbe said absent-mindedly as she leafed through the brochure.

“Alright!” The man pulled a stack of paper off his printer and handed them to her, along with a thin new passport and a single ticket in a thick, sturdy folder. “Here's everything you'll need to get there. You will want to make sure not to lose any of it; we can look you up in the system at the station, but not without a form of photo identification,” he emphasized the last part for significance.

“Got it. Thank you very much…” she glanced at the nameplate on his desk for the first time, “Rick. You're saving my life, here.”

“Yeah, that's a really depressing thought for this early on a Monday,” Rick answered with his unwavering smile. “I wish you and your husband-to-be the best of luck in your new life together. Happy trails to a happy heart!”

 

Thisbe couldn't stop looking over her shoulder from Edinburgh to London, and especially after she arrived in her hometown. Even after she had been admitted through not one but four different spaceport security screening gates and was safely ensconced in the plush passenger lounge, wine spritzer in hand, waiting for the next lunar gateway shuttle to begin boarding.

She felt certain that at any moment someone would look at her, really look at her, and realize who she was. They would know that she didn't belong on this flight. Someone would tip off her family, and she would be collected and swept back to the life she still quite couldn't believe she was permanently leaving.

Alone with her thoughts, she wondered if it wasn't quite so much fear of them forcing her back as it was fear of deciding to walk away from it all. She had been penniless (relatively; she still had some cash in her pocketbook for any final emergencies) for less than twenty-four hours. Could she really handle that for an extended period of time? And her friends might be under the influence of the Vandergoss fortune, but they were still the only friends she had.

When she found herself wondering if it would truly be so terrible to have a baby a little earlier than she had planned, Thisbe pushed her cocktail aside and went out to the deck for some air.

It would be an incest baby! She chided herself furiously. She didn't care what sort of euphemisms they used to describe it. By their own admission, that baby would be some sort of genetic remix of herself, her mother, and her father. If that wasn't incest, she didn't know what was. Bile crept up the back of her throat, for her parents, but also at herself for even for a moment considering the idea. The fact that they were willing to disown her if she didn't comply with their sick demands...

“Ms. Jackson? Thisbe Jackson?”

“Huh?”

The flight attendant, who had been trying to get her attention while her brain struggled to remember that she was flying under an assumed name, looked annoyed. She gave Thisbe a long-suffering smile.

“We're boarding now, if you're finished with your drink.”

“Uh, yeah. Yes! I'm done. Let's get moving!”

“Great. Thank you so much.”

She could practically feel the attendant's eyes rolling behind her back as she grabbed her suitcase and made her way to the final boarding gate. But that didn't matter. This was it. No turning back.

And strangely enough, when the smiling attendants in their matching blue and white uniforms took her ticket and ushered her aboard, she didn't turn her head to look back at London even once. Her attention was straight ahead, focused on the stars.