Match Forged by Lettie Jones

Author:Lettie Jones [Jones, Lettie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lettie Jones
Published: 2020-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Lauren took her to a small office—empty at that time of night.

As soon as the door closed behind them, Lauren rushed to hug Elizabeth. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I had no idea Rex was your match. That’s so awful.”

Elizabeth pulled her off of her, which wasn’t hard with that huge belly taking up most of the room between them.

“He’s her match,” Magda said. “She’ll learn to love him.”

Elizabeth swallowed. Love Rex? She shook her head, ignoring the nervous butterflies in her belly. “Are you going to answer my questions now?”

“Yes,” Magda said. “But maybe we can answer most of them by explaining certain things first.”

The women looked at each other. Magda nodded at Lauren to go ahead and talk.

“I guess I’ll start with something you almost discovered already,” Lauren said. “The Mudden men can only father male children.”

She paused.

“They can only have boys? All of them?” Nothing off the top of her head could cause this, especially on an entire planet.

Lauren nodded.

“How long has this been going on?” Elizabeth asked, her doctor side suddenly very curious.

“Over two hundred years.”

“Two hundred years?! But that’s impossible. The population would have died out by now.”

The women looked at each other, waiting for her to come to some sort of understanding. But there was nothing to understand. A population of only males who reproduced only through traditional means, which she knew the Mudden did, could not survive two hundred years.

“This is why they kidnap their women,” Lauren finally said, like she expected her to have come to that conclusion on her own.

“They kidnap their women?”

“Oh right,” Lauren said. “I forget that you came here voluntarily.”

“All the women on Mudden were taken from their home planets and brought here against their will,” Magda explained. “We were brought here, usually in groups with other women, and then married off to our matches in ceremonies like today’s.”

Lauren and Magda were kidnapped? Elizabeth tried to remember the number of women she had met on Mudden so far. She’d seen quite a few come in and out of the palace in the last few weeks. Sure, she’d seen less women than men, but she’d assumed that in their patriarchal society men were more involved in politics. But all those women were kidnap victims?

“But you love Devon,” Elizabeth said, turning on Lauren.

Lauren rubbed her belly and smiled. “Now I do, but at the beginning, I was mad! Then over time, I realized that we were meant for each other.”

“Because he’s your match?” Elizabeth barely restrained herself from gagging.

“Yes.”

“On the battleship that orbits the planet, there is a supercomputer with an algorithm that tells the Mudden clan which women would be a good match for their men,” Magda explained. “Each man that comes of age gets tested, then recruiters go off to the other planets and gather information about eligible women there. If the algorithm finds a Mudden man matches the woman, then she is taken.”

“What do you mean ‘eligible’?”

“Not married, has no children and no strong family ties.” That described Elizabeth perfectly.

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