Commitment Hour Read Online Free Page B

another attack, my head was clearing too. I had just enough time to squirm the knife from my back and throw it into the darkness before the woman was on top of me, clawing at my throat and scratching for my eyes.
    I don’t know if we fought for minutes or seconds. I remember heat: my body, hers, and the sweaty suffocation of clothes over my face as we grappled. At some point, the pain and screaming woke my male half, where he slept far off in Birds Home; carried on the wings of crows, his spirit raced in to take over my body. The moment it took possession I felt stronger, more in control. As a man, I knew how to fight and no woman could beat me. I began to punch instead of bite, to grab the woman’s softest parts and twist.
    Then people were separating us, Yoskar among them. He went to her, not me, babbling apologies and love. The male spirit in me vanished as quickly as it had come and I was left a discarded woman, weeping in rage. I wanted to start the fight again, just to rip Yoskar’s pretty face with my fingernails, but the onlookers held me back. They carried me to a private room of the wedding pavilion and a woman wearing the purple scarf of a doctor stripped off my clothes to bathe my wounds.
    “You’ll feel a hundred times better when you’re clean,” she said.
    She was in her early forties, a woman with confident voice and hands. Those hands ranged over my body, sewing up the stab wound in my back (“Very shallow—you’re lucky”) and tending multiple bites and scratches. All the while, she spoke of her admiration for my performance that night. “You have fire,” the doctor said. “I’ve never seen such passion.”
    Gradually the pain and heat remaining from the fight changed. The doctor’s hands were still at work. My head was growing dizzy; I could no longer remember wounds in the places she touched, but I let her continue. She kissed me on the right breast and whispered, “Passion.” I felt my body twist toward her, wanting more.
    I remember heat: my body, hers, the sweaty suffocation…
    At dawn I woke alone, in the same room and lying under a thin blanket on the floor. Surprisingly, my male soul had come back to take charge of my female body; and I barely had time to roll onto my side before I threw up, appalled by what I had done. Obviously, the doctor had drugged me—that was the only explanation for how I could participate in such perversion. Two women! How could my female half have been so weak as to yield to such…no, I’d been drugged. Otherwise, I would never have…
    I ran outside to the beach, frantic to scrub my flesh raw, to clean the doctor’s smell from my face; but when I splashed on water, I stopped immediately. In my mind I could still hear the woman whispering in my ear, “You’ll feel a hundred times better when you’re clean.”
    Leaning against the bank in Cypress Marsh, I watched the knight tenderly washing the Neut’s face. He whispered softly in the creature’s ear; their faces were close and the knight’s touch gentle.
    I knew lovers when I saw them. If I’d had anything left in my stomach, I would have thrown up again.
    What kind of man could bring himself to bed a Neut? One incapable of shame. A man who could openly wear OldTech plastic. The one and only time I’d worn plastic, I was eight and a group of us kids had found an OldTech dump in the forest, just off the Feliss City highway. We spent the afternoon digging through it and ornamenting ourselves with junk: bracelets twisted together from greenish wire and capes made of plastic sheets. I was proud of a plastic collar I found, shaped like a horseshoe but big enough to go around my neck like a yoke. We came back to the cove wearing our finery and huge grins, expecting the adults to praise our finds. Instead, they slapped us till our cheeks burned and promised we would be struck ill by the diseases that OldTech trash always carries.
    A knight wearing plastic OldTech armor had to be a walking plague. The