Read Thrice Uncharmed (Wynne d’Arzon) for Free Online

and the secrets they couldn’t share were related?
    ****
    Wynne got home late — too late, really, but she did it rarely enough that she just got an orange 'mind you don't make a habit of this' warning light when she tapped the entry pad to enter her family's home. Someone like Bridge, who broke curfew regularly, would get the red 'your resource allotment had been fined' light, and the ticket would appear on the personal tablet.
    Her mother glanced at her as she entered. "Pregnant?"
    "No," Wynne answered flatly. Her mother wasn't trying to be rude; that was just how she asked if she had a boyfriend yet. Wynne understood, but that didn't mean she liked the question. "Are you?"
    Her mother snorted as if it were impossible, but galaxal women in their mid-thirties had children all the time. Though Wynne couldn't think of any examples that she knew in person.
    Actually, now that she thought of it, the colony had a significant die-off in adults over thirty. Her own materline was solid, lots of women, but she couldn't remember the last time she'd met a female Cleanuman or Saluman who was past Tetrad. And her paterline was the only family line she could think of wherein most of the men were dead — her father, Bridge's father. Tier two families, both, though her father had been Imaguman and Bridge's father had been Advisuman. Both had died shortly after their thirtieth birthdays, if she remembered correctly, but she found herself oddly unable to remember. Her father hadn't died all that many years ago, and Uncle Ross had died only last year.
    Wynne frowned. She wasn't sure what was more disturbing: all those details, or that they'd just now occurred to her.
    "Problem?" her mother asked briskly, oddly awake for an hour when she was usually fully asleep.
    Goose bumps tickled along the back of her neck. "You tell me. You aren't usually up this late."
    "Sea and Bridge aren't back yet."
    Wynne's face abruptly felt cold. She had used Bridge's tablet to research the court case that got Instructor Smith deported to the colony, and with Bridge not being to Dyad yet, of course Auntie Sea would be involved in any questioning. "Back?"
    Her mother shrugged casually, but that wasn't reassuring. Her mother was intelligent enough to fake body language if she wanted to. "Oh, just some Secumen investigating Bridge, again. That girl needs a good, solid boy to settle her."
    Wynne wouldn't wish her cousin on 'a good, solid boy', but she nodded to be polite. Bridge truthfully wasn't at fault this time, if she were reading the situation aright, but Wynne had to keep her tongue and trust that it would work out in the end.
    "Did you get your homework done?"
    She considered all the little details that were building up to make her downright terrified of her future, and she looked her mother straight in the eye. "Yes."
    That was the first time she could remember intentionally lying to her mother.
    She also got away with it.
    ****
    The next morning, Wynne awoke early feeling exhausted, but more from sleeping poorly than from getting less sleep than usual, though there was that, too. She picked up her tablet from its shelf beside her bed. She pinged the previous day's homework to her various instructors, and she took the early-morning opportunity to get her math homework done, if nothing else.
    She couldn't let her grades slip, and not only because it would look suspicious. Wynne had worked hard to keep up with Hector in their classes, and in most of them, she'd succeeded in making him work for valedictorian. She wasn't about to give that up now.
    By the time her alarm rang for her to get breakfast two hours later, she'd gotten half her load done, which made her wonder if the instructors had conspired to give less homework than usual, on account of her missing tablet.
    Or maybe she just worked incredibly efficiently in the morning. Or maybe my mind just isn't awake enough yet to do things properly.
    In any event, she'd figure out which it was once she got her