Free Assigned a Guardian by Emily Tilton

reasonable confidence that Joe had no reason to punish her. Her confidence proved well-founded, but the day after that second date with James had also seen the beginning of the way she ruined everything, for that was the day she met Melanie.
    Melanie Foster was studying in the educational wing, in the upper-division program that corresponded to what Kayla had thought of as graduate school, to become a researcher on economic theory. Melanie was brilliant, and Draco, even Kayla could see, needed women like her very badly, to help build an economy under circumstances that were in some ways an economist’s dream (Draco as a sandbox with lots of toys) and in some ways an economist’s nightmare (Draco as a powder keg with people inside the keg along with the powder).
    Melanie seemed to Kayla a beacon of hope, because the research-academic path was the only one that had been designated for women that appeared to give the slightest hope of autonomy. The very fact that fully three-quarters of the female researchers on Draco lived in Lourcy House as permanently single women under the authority of Jane Loggins seemed proof of that. Already, only a month into her new life on Draco, Kayla longed for the day she could ‘declare for Lourcy,’ as it was called. The very thought of it, of being able to honor her own name that way while she reclaimed her identity, made her life in the pre-research training program bearable.
    In that program, Kayla had to refresh her memory on basic economic theory, which was frustrating enough in and of itself because her grasp of it had never been very strong in business school. She, also, however had learn all sorts of niggling little details about life on Draco like the approved ratio of compost to acreage for the growing of soy.
    Melanie, five years her junior, was five years ahead in the program, and she already got to play with numbers like that, rather than just memorizing them. Kayla found herself idolizing Melanie.
    The reason the trouble happened, though, was that Melanie idolized Kayla, too.
    “You’re Kayla Lourcy, aren’t you?” Melanie said, the first time Kayla sat down in the cafeteria, hoping just to eat her imitation chicken in peace. Kayla’s first instinct was to be hostile to this second-gen, but the tone in Melanie’s voice seemed so adulatory, so soothing to Kayla’s bruised ego, that she smiled across the table and said with a sigh, “Yes, unfortunately.”
    “Oh, my God—not unfortunately! You kept the dream alive after your father died and the government started to persecute you!”
    Kayla smiled and laughed ruefully. “And I got my backside paddled as soon as I arrived here.”
    “That was terrible!” Melanie said. “I couldn’t believe it! They say it was just because you said something about the Basic Law. Is that true?”
    “Well, really it was because I refused to sit down.”
    “Exactly, though, right? I mean, does every girl on Draco have to sit down if Marjorie Leary tells them to?”
    Kayla felt the excitement rising. This girl seemed like a ray of hope. But maybe she was a trap?
    “Apparently,” Kayla said, carefully guarding her tone, making it neutral.
    “I’m Melanie Foster,” the girl said, extending her hand.
    “Nice to meet you,” Kayla replied, taking it.
    It was not a protest movement, Kayla quickly realized. The second-gens had grown up with the idea that their survival depended on order pounded into them day after day. But Melanie and her friends wanted things to change, eventually, she told Kayla.
    “When we have a new administration,” she said one day, after they had been having lunch together every day for a week. “The Basic Law can’t hold on forever. Maybe it makes economic sense now, but if we really want the prosperity the Learys keep talking about, women can’t be baby factories. It’s biology, sure, but is it really nature?”
    “No!” Kayla said. “No!”
    “I want you to meet my friends. We have to start something