“You don’t have any manual vehicles?”
“No. Well, technically yes, but only in amusement parks. There’s one calledThe Ranchnot far from where I live. You can ride horses and drive old-fashioned cars. It’s really fun!”
“Amusement parks,” he mumbled under his breath. “Do you have amusement parks showing off how men used to look, too?”
I gathered my hands in my lap. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t have any real men left, so do you see us men as something historical too?”
“No, of course not. It’s true we don’t have as many men as we would like, but since the toxic war ended we’ve gone from a ratio of twenty-six women per man to fourteen women per man. That’s a significant improvement, wouldn’t you say?”
“Hmm.” He grunted, keeping his gaze out the windshield.
“You have women here too, right?”
“A few.”
“How many are a few?”
“Maybe one for every hundred thousand men. Overall, we have maybe a hundred left in the Northlands.
“I wonder what it’s like to grow up as a woman in this part of the world,” I thought out loud.
Boulder narrowed his eyes as if I had offended him. “At least we let our women be women. You witches castrate your men.”
I answered in a high-pitched voice “We donotcastrate our men! How would we be able to grow in numbers if we did? Where do you hear such nonsense?”
“Everybody knows how you enslave men and make them into little puppets.”
“What are you talking about?” I almost laughed at the absurdity.
“I’ve met men from your part of the world and they look and act like women.”
“So? That’s the modern man for you. They have evolved into caring, emotionally mature beings with no need to classify themselves as a gender,” I lectured him and pushed a strand of my brown hair back.
“That’s just a fancy way of saying that you’re raising your boys to be fucking pussies.”
I clasped a hand to my mouth and gasped out in shock.
For the next twenty-minutes we didn’t speak a word. It was clear to me that he was as judgmental toward my part of the world as I was toward his.
“You’re staying at the Gray Manor,” Boulder informed me. “It’s where our ruler Khan Aurelius lives.”
I snickered a bit and looked out the window.
“What’s so funny to you?” he said grumpily.
“Your names. They’re all so pompous.”
“You have a problem with our names now?”
“No, it’s just funny to me that you would choose to name your boys after great emperors, kings, generals, and gods.”
“Why is that funny?
I turned to him and smiled. “Honestly, who does that?”
“You would rather we gave our boys boring loser names?”
