“Which was evidently never even on that freighter that got pirated,” Lilli adds.
Vaughn clears his throat, as I feel the needle slide from my arm. A second later, something cold is sprayed over the hole it leaves in my skin. “We think the crate is still here somewhere,” he says. “But even if it isn’t, we’re pretty sure the janitor we found here knows where it is. He’s lying about something, anyway. Sotelo and Jamison are trying to get the truth out of him, with their ‘Bad Cop/Empath’ approach.”
“No good cop?” I ask, as something else sprays my arm.
Dreyer snorts. “What would be the point of that?”
I flex my right hand, and the movement triggers a slight sting in the hole in the crook of my arm. “Is this thing done?”
After a second, Vaughn answers. “It looks like it wants to do a final full-body scan. So just lie still for a minute, okay?”
“Fine. But keep talking to me,” I say, as the soft whirr of a small motor echoes from somewhere near my feet. “Why do I know Theron as a planet, if it’s really a research facility? What do they research here?”
“We don’t have a definitive answer on that yet,” Vaughn says. “Because the scientists trashed their equipment and deleted their data when they found out they were about to be raided. Though we assume they kept off-site backups somewhere.”
“Wait, they destroyed their own facility?” The motor purrs toward my knees, and a bright light traces its progress inside the lid covering me. “Why would they do that?”
“Because whatever they were doing here is illegal,” Dreyer says. “Our best guess is that they were fine-tuning the techniques they used to implant your false memories and to wipe your old ones. Some of the neural mapping equipment that survived the purge seems to support that theory.”
“So, wait. You think this is where I was implanted with false memories? And that whoever wrote the program just named my fake homeworld after the company?”
“That’s our current theory,” Vaughn confirms.
“Well then, where was I before all that? How did I get here?”
“We’re still working on that,” Lilli chimes in. “I still think you were a prisoner, like me, and they rerouted you here to experiment on you, rather than actually sending you to Rhodon.”
“How likely is that?” Panic flutters in my chest as the light and the soft whirr of the motor crawl toward my stomach.
“Not likely,” Vaughn says. “That’s just Lilli’s guess.”
“It’s a good guess!” she insists. “UA owns both this facility and a prison planet. Why wouldn’t the two be connected?”
“Lilli, it might be upsetting for Grace to think that she was a criminal, in her life before the false memories,” Dreyer points out. “Especially while she’s locked in a medpod.”
“Shit. Of course. Sorry, Grace!” Lilli calls out from across the room. “I guess it would be hard to think of yourself as a criminal when you don’t remember doing anything wrong.”
But could she be right? I wonder as the motor whirrs toward my head. And if I am a criminal, does that mean that Universal Authority just…repurposed me? Sentenced me to life as Silas’s concubine, in lieu of a life sentence on a prison planet?
Finally, the pod beeps, then the lid opens on its own, giving me the first good look at the room I’m in, which appears to be a science lab crossed with a doctor’s office. Everything is clean and shiny, and made of either glass or metal. The air smells like antiseptic, though that may be whatever the medpod just sprayed on my arm. And this room is cold.
I push myself upright, and Vaughn leans in to brace my back with his arm. “Careful,” he says. “You’ve been out cold for two days.”
“No wonder I have to pee.”
Lilli laughs. “The bathroom’s over here. I’ve been in there three times in the past hour. Isn’t it a little early in my pregnancy for that?”
I don’t have an answer for her, so I rush past her into the restroom, but just as I reach the doorway, my head begins to spin and the room goes dark.
“Whoa.” Suddenly Vaughn is there, his arms around me. He smells amazing, and he feels amazing in his weird new clothes, and when he speaks, I feel my lady parts clench. “You look like you’re about to pass out again.”
“I think I stood up too fast,” I tell him. “But I really have to pee.”
“Need some help?”
“No!” My face burns at the very thought. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
He lets me go, and I slide the door closed between us while I take care of business.
When I emerge from the bathroom, I find Dreyer and Vaughn huddled over a clear, thin tablet, reading text I can’t make out from across the room. And now that I’m not preoccupied by the demands of my bladder, I can’t move on until I address the most obvious change that took place while I was unconscious. “What are you two wearing?”
Vaughn looks at me, then he frowns down at his own body, as if he hasn’t given his wardrobe a second thought.
Dreyer spreads her arms, turning to give me a better look. “Turns out Theron was working on more than just memory implants. What do you think?”
“It kind of looks like…armor.” I step closer for a better look. “But it doesn’t feel like armor.” I shrug. “Not that I know what armor looks or feels like.”
“As soldiers we wore a clumsier version of this. It was thicker, and it didn’t move quite so well. But the light weight and movability aren’t the only things UA has improved upon, for battle wear.” Vaughn taps something on his chest, and his entire body disappears into a familiar telltale shimmer. Everything except his head and his hands. “There’s a helmet and a set of gloves that complete the look,” he adds with a grin.
“Nano-tech,” I breathe. “Just like my modesty sheath.”
“Not exactly,” he says. “But it’s a similar enough technology that we’re pretty sure this is where Meshach got his. Though he’s wasting it, using it for nothing more than covering natural beauty, everywhere it occurs.” His smile warms my insides, and my hands want to reach for him.
“Well, I highly doubt they sold him the militarized version,” Dreyer says. “Thought I still think it’s psychotic of him to use such extraordinary and expensive technology to make an entire gender disappear.”
“Here, here!” Lilli calls from a countertop nearby, where she’s still staring at her com device.
“So, are we about to head into battle?” I ask, glancing again in amusement at the shimmer that now hides Vaughn’s glorious body from me.
“Hopefully not.” He touches his chest again, and the rest of him reappears. “But these things seem to be almost tailor-made for us, so we figured we should learn how to use them when the learning curve isn’t likely to get us killed.”
“They made these for you guys?” I step closer, impressed with how well the strange clothing seems to fit them both.
“Or for people just like us.” Dreyer lifts one hand to show me a bit of prominent stitching on the underside of her forearm. “There are even seams to allow for the deployment of our onboard personal weapons system. Not that I have arm blades.” She shrugs and gives me a small smile as a long, sharp bone spire shoots silently from her elbow. “Though I do plan to make use of that particular innovation.” She shoves her arm back, demonstrating what would surely be a fatal blow to any opponent stupid enough to sneak up on her from behind. “They were clearly planning to someday outfit an entire army of super-soldiers.”
“Grace, come see!” Lilli calls, clearly bored with a demonstration she’s probably already seen. “I tried out one of those medpods earlier, and it took an ultrasound!” She points to the machine she was evidently cocooned in, and I look up to realize that there are three more of them, lined up in two rows across the large room. And I can see where two more stood, before Zamora and Lawrence claimed them for the Dinghy.
Lilli holds out her arm to show me the screen on her wrist com, and I move closer so I can see the image. �
��Oh my god!”
“I know! I mean, it looks more like a jellybean than a baby, this early, but if you squint…!” She drags her finger across the screen, and the image rotates. Then it starts to move, and I realize she’s showing me a video. “My insurance didn’t cover anything like this, when I was pregnant the first time.”
I blink at her. “You’ve been pregnant before?”
The room goes silent around me, and I realize Vaughn and Dreyer have stopped discussing whatever they’re looking at. And that all eyes are now on Lilli.
“Yeah. I had a little boy. But he died.” The pain in her eyes looks fresh, though she’s already told me she was in prison for several years, and I assume her pregnancy occurred at some point before that. “I didn’t think I’d ever have another one. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to do this again, until it happened. And now…” She gives me a quiet smile and a shrug. “That diagnostic thing already knows the gender.” Lilli holds out her wrist com again and shows me a link that’s flashing. “If I tap on that, it’ll tell me. But I’m not sure I want to know just yet, because if it’s a boy, I’m afraid I’ll feel like I’m replacing Eldon.” She shrugs, and I can only imagine how difficult this must be for her. Not just going through it, but talking about it. “Anyway, since we have a couple of those things in the cargo hold, Carson says we’ll be able to take pictures and footage of this little one any time we want.”
“Once we get the pods hooked up,” Dreyer says. “Which we can’t do until we have a bigger ship.”
“But once we do get them hooked up…it looks like one of these machines should be able to talk Carson through delivering the baby.”
“The machine talks?” I turn to the nearest medpod again, viewing it with a new perspective.
“There’s a vocal instruction mode, yes.” Dreyer looks up from the tablet Vaughn is still staring at. “It also puts out a very thorough diagnostic report. Like yours.” She glances pointedly at the tablet. “If you’d like to see.”
“Has it told you why I passed out?”
“No,” Vaughn says. “But it’s given us a very thorough report on the general state of your health. Which is excellent, by the way. Given what’s in this report, and what we know Lilli went through, I think we can draw some pretty reasonable conclusions.”
“That intimate contact with your body is changing my body?” That’s what he warned me about, down in the Dinghy’s cargo hold.
“Yes. But in the past tense,” Dreyer says.
I frown at them, but I can’t bring myself to come any closer. To read the report for myself. “What does that mean?”
“Your report is perfectly normal.” Vaughn hands the tablet to Dreyer and steps toward me with his arms open. “In every way. Which means that the changes are evidently complete. You’re fertile.”
A lump rises in my throat, and my eyes water. “I—” I swallow to clear my throat, but when I blink the tears away, more form. “I can have children?”
I don’t think I ever really believed in that possibility, despite what Vaughn told me. Even knowing what happened with Lilli. Until this moment, deep down I believed that being with me meant giving up his dream of a family, and that someday he would resent me for that. For failing to give him what he needs.
But now…
“Yes.” He takes my hands in his. “If that’s what you want.”
Is that what I want?
On Gebose, I saw babies all the time. So many women were blessed with them, but no matter how my empty arms ached, I was never allowed to hold them, or even come close enough to make them laugh. I never even dreamed I could have one of my own.
“Yes. Yes, I want children.” I throw myself at Vaughn, and his arms wrap around me. “I want your children.”
“Then you shall have them.” His grip on me tightens, and his voice resonates deep inside me. “As many as you want.” Then he lifts me onto the nearest counter, and his mouth finds mine, and I’m drowning in the taste of him. In the glorious feel of him beneath my hands.
In the promise of a future—of a real life, full of people I choose to be near.
Just as soon as he and the crew are done waging their vendetta against Universal Authority.
“So, wait. Am I ovulating?” I ask, when Vaughn finally steps back, his golden-eyed gaze still warming me from the inside.
“Not yet,” Dreyer says with another glance at the tablet. “But if what happened to Lilli is what’s happening to you, you will likely ovulate the next time you and Coleman…come together.”
Vaughn snorts. “She’s censoring her language, on account of your sheltered upbringing.”
“Which was evidently total fiction,” I remind him. “So, wait. Having sex will make me ovulate? That’s not how it’s supposed to work, is it?” I can’t trust much of what I learned in the convent—since that never really happened—but surely there’d be no point in programing me with memories of inaccurate biological knowledge.
“No. Not in humans, anyway,” Dreyer says.
Lilli hops down from her countertop. “They explained it to me like this: one of the changes Vaughn’s fluids made to your body, to better accommodate the beast’s need to propagate, switched you over from a menstrual cycle to an oestrus cycle. Like in house cats. Which means you basically ovulate on demand now. For him.” She gives Vaughn a conspiratorial wink, before turning back to me. “Weird, huh?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I admit. “I’ve never ovulated before.”
“You—? Really? You were that infertile?”
I shrug. “I’ve never had a period. That I remember, anyway.” Not that any of what I remember is real. “What does it… What does it feel like?”
“Your period?”
“Being pregnant.” I slide down from the countertop, and Vaughn hugs me from behind, pressing his warm, hard chest against my back, his arms folded around my torso. My head tucked just beneath his chin.
“Oh. Right now, it just feels like I’m always a little queasy. Except when I’m a lot queasy.” Lilli gives me a far-away smile. “But soon, it’ll feel like a little miracle. A fluttery, heartburn-y, can’t-get-comfortable, get-this-thing-out-of-me-now miracle.” Her smile grows. “There’s nothing else like it. Thank god.”
“Thank god?”
“Not gonna lie,” she warns me through her smile. “A lot of it sucks. But then it’s over, and you have this tiny little baby to snuggle. I mean, part of that sucks too. You’re basically never going to sleep again. But—”
“I will make sure you get plenty of sleep,” Vaughn leans down to murmur into my ear.
“—that little baby trumps everything.”
Dreyer snorts. “Yeah, until it pees in your face.”
“Even then,” Lilli assures me. “Babies are basically little bundles of uncontrolled bodily functions, but they’re the cutest things in the whole damn universe. My mom always said God made them cute, so humans wouldn’t be tempted to eat their young.”
I laugh, and Vaughn’s arms tighten around me.
“I do want kids, but I’m not sure I’m ready for that just yet,” I admit. We don’t have a home, and getting a bigger ship won’t really fix that. You can’t raise babies while you soar among the stars, satisfying a vendetta against an evil conglomerate, can you?
But my body is arguing that I am ready. Just being this close to Vaughn makes moisture gather between my thighs. I ache to have him inside me. He smells so good that I’m fighting an urge to turn around, figure out how to get his weird body armor off, and lick his chest just for a taste of him.
“Yeah, my mom used to say that’s why pregnancy takes nine months,” Lilli says. “To give you time to get ready.”
I wonder if my mother ever said anything like that.
I wonder who my mother was. Or is. Do I still have a mother? A family? Was all that stolen from me, when the scientists erased my past and implanted me with false memories?
What happened to my real ones? Can I get them back?
“What’s wrong?” Vaughn turns me by my shoulders, so he can see my face, and his nostrils flare. As if he can smell the fact that I’ve upset myself. “Grace? What do you need?” When I don’t have an answer for him, he leans down for a kiss, and almost immediately plunges his tongue into my mouth.
I groan, trapped between the anxiety in my head and the needs of my body, until his scent—until the taste of him—pushes the former away, in favor of the latter. Of those needs.
But Vaughn pulls away long before I’m done with his tongue. “You’re sad,” he says. “Scared and anxious.”
“You had to kiss her to figure that out?” Dreyer says. “I knew that just from looking at her face.”
Lilli laughs, but Vaughn ignores them both.
“He’s tasting her hormones, or something like that,” Lilli explains. “Carson does the same thing. He says it’s like taking someone’s temperature, but for emotions.”
“The beast says you need comfort,” Vaughn leans forward to murmur into my hair, where the vague ache from my head wound seems to have faded, under the medpod’s attention. “Will you let me comfort you?”
“As long as comfort is a euphemism for fucking me stupid,” I whisper into his ear. And as my own words register, heat radiates from my face. “I’m sorry. That was vulgar.”
“Yes, it was,” he growls, staring down at me through eyes dilated until they’re little more than thin gold rings around an infinite black center. Then he grabs me by the hips and lifts me until my legs wrap around his waist, the material of his body armor oddly soft against my bare thighs. “We’ll be back,” he snarls at Lilli and Dreyer. “Eventually.”
“What—?” Dreyer calls after us.
“Just let them go,” Lilli says. “They’re not going to be able to focus on anything else until they’ve scratched that itch, anyway.”
Vaughn shoves the door open and carries me into a nondescript hallway full of widely spaced doors. At the end of that hallway, he turns left, into another corridor, where the doors have numbers on them. Like apartments. Which is when I remember that he said the infirmary is located inside a residential building. An eerily empty residential building.
Vendetta (Project Vetus Book 2) Page 24