by V. K. Ludwig
He would never say no to that.
Then, Mares’ voice broke through. “You may place the crop into families, but you shall stand by your word and step back during our next vote if asked to.”
Chapter 21
Eden
Sweetness infused the stale air inside the Vault, all used up by the many healers guiding hover carts along the rows of exowombs. It twisted my guts, making the half-digested contents of my meager breakfast climb up my esophagus.
How could I choose one child if I wanted to adopt all?
I held out the large piece of cloth, a poor substitute for the warmth of a mother, or the softness of her skin, muttering, “This is worse than I thought it would be.”
Nifal typed a command into the holographic control panel, and the amniotic fluid gulped down the drain in a pale, yellowish tint. He removed the baby through the access flap on the side and clipped the umbilical cord.
Whomp.
Another ten-pound-something baby in my arms.
Silence dominated the chamber, except for the occasional command issued, or failing drain splashing onto the metal floor in a loud gush. Not a single cry echoed through the Vault, the Vetusian males oblivious to the fact that they had just been harvested.
Stop calling this a harvest, I had said.
It’s a birth, I had said.
Nothing about this was any different from bringing in a crop of corn.
They stripped the boys from their protective hull. Lucky ones received a swaddle. Rushed ones ended up on the unforgiving metal bowl of the hover cart.
Weight measured, height determined, vitals scanned, they slapped a digital stamp on each one.
Three colors.
Green was likely to survive.
But heaven forbid a pink chest carried a red stamp, and healers threw around the words budget, and resources.
Why waste it on something unlikely to thrive?
The question made me shudder, rattled my bones.
“Hey, little one.” I looked down at the Vetusian in my arms, watching how a less vibrant blue disappeared behind lazy blinks. He strained his neck and rooted with his mouth, his skin in wrinkles, and his hair clinging wet to his scalp.
“Eden,” Nifal said, his voice rushing me along while keeping the strict edge off the undertone. “Many others are waiting. We need to hurry along.”
I nodded and placed the baby into the hover cart, immediately turning my back on him. No need to see him stamped and branded.
An age-trembled hand landed softly on my shoulder. “Shall I call for Torin to take you home?”
I stared over at row twenty-five, where Torin discussed the projected success rate of this harvest with a healer. Uniform lining his dignified posture, he stood there, unaware that, for me, the world was ending.
“I’m fine,” I said, tone sharper than intended, whetted by heartbreak.
Nifal let a deep breath rattle through his chest, then waved me over to the next exowomb. “Even Torin’s power is limited, Eden. Protocols need to be followed. We cannot allow a family to adopt a child whose chances of survival are undetermined.”
“I get that.” And yet I snarled it. “What I don’t understand is why they’re not getting equal treatment.”
“You are speaking as any mother should, and yet it does not change that Garrison Earth has reached its spending limit.” A pat against my shaky fingers, and he initiated the harvest on yet another ear of corn. “Torin is trying so hard to please you.”
“I don’t want him to please me. I want him to do the right thing because he understands that this is fucked up.”
“A good deed is a good deed, no matter the root it grew from.” He let out a huff. “You cannot expect him to change a lifetime of thinking during a few lunar cycles. I raised this Vetusian like my own, and never have I seen him this open and content. So eager to unshackle himself from old burdens.”
I glanced over at Torin once more, wanting to bury myself in his chest, hide from this place. And there was no doubt he’d wrap me in his body and offer shelter. As much as he was the one who had changed my world, he was also protecting me from it. Holding my hand while I stumbled to find my footing.
“I didn’t sleep well these last few nights,” I confessed, preparing a fresh towel.
“Still the same dream?” He waited for my nod before he continued. “You could not have saved the warrior if his injuries were indeed as dire as you explained. And you had no reason to.”
“He asked for my forgiveness, Nifal.” For a moment I wanted to shove my face into the towel, trying to hide that guilt keeping me awake at night. “And I couldn’t even spare a seventy cents bullet to end his suffering.”
“We were the enemy, correct?”
“That word’s blurry from where I’m standing. Guess I spent too much time behind the scenes of the Vetusian Empire.”
Nifal remained silent for a while, preparing the new hover cart for the next child.
“What is the present on Earth will be the future on Cultum,” he said eventually. “What is the present in this chamber is already the past on the planet Ja’loar. If the universe has taught me anything, it is that neither past nor future exist. Only this very moment and filling it with regret will do you no good. You and Torin are so very much alike.”
“Stubborn?”
“Yes, you are both very headstrong, but I was referring to something else.” He let our gloved hands intertwine, his soft gaze immediately calming my mind. “Stop blaming yourself for things you had no control over. Take pride in the good you have done during all this. You affected the lives of millions of females, easing their transition. You are the reason many of these children will grow up in loving families. And it was you who showed Torin that he is not doomed to a life of loneliness.”
“I’m trying hard to give this a real shot, Nifal.” My eyes sunk to the ground together with my mood, my breath stilling in my chest. “Not gonna lie. I still feel like a traitor sometimes.”
Especially when I caught myself feeling things for Torin I shouldn’t. Closeness. Affection. I didn’t dare wonder what else.
“It will ease, child. And one day, you will see yourself as the link between our two species that you are. There will be peace between us, and we will flourish together.”
He tapped against the exowomb, bringing me back into the here and now. Showing me once more why I couldn’t keep dragging my own sorrows behind, acting as if those around me didn’t suffer just the same.
“This child is in distress.” At the swipe of a holographic button, the drain choked. Nifal opened the exowomb and lifted the baby from the remaining amniotic fluid, soiled with meconium. “Weak body tone, heart rate much too low.”
He skipped the blanket I held out and placed him onto the new hover cart a healer had brought. The boy slipped over the smooth surface, his limbs jerking, his face scrunching up.
I stepped up to the cart and bunched the blanket in my fists. “Let me rub him a little and see if we can stimulate that tiny heart of his.”
“You will do no such thing, child,” Nifal said. “This Vetusian will need to be brought away for further evaluation.”
“Are you kidding me? So much technology, so little common sense. I just want to rub him down with a damn towel. Let me at least try before they slap a red stamp on him.”
Beep.
One sound.
Another red chest.
Unlikely to thrive.
A hole in the budget.
The integrated vital scanner of the bowl had detected nothing more but a slight drop in heart rate, and yet it was enough to make this boy’s survival a little less likely, a little less wanted.
Bile swept into my mouth.
I flung my gloved hands onto my lips and ran toward the window, vomit already pushing through the gaps of my fingers. I let it trickle into a metal bowl filled with medical instruments when a tissue pushed into the corner of my vision.
“Don’t,” I barked, already s
ensing the warmth of Torin’s hand approaching my back.
I stripped my gloves and dropped them into the bowl, then took the tissue and cleaned myself up.
“Perhaps I should take you back to Ardev Five,” he said. “Tell Nifal which child will be ours, and I’ll return for him once the healers completed the birth.”
“It’s not a birth, it’s a harvest!” I tossed the tissue into the bowl as well and turned around, my eyes burning from all those blinks I refused, because each one threatened to make me bawl. “I always thought it was cruel to call it a harvest. But you know what? Harvest is still way too nice a word for this.”
I swung one hand onto my eyes, my lungs too paralyzed to provide me with oxygen, my mind going foggy.
“Sh…” Like a wall, his arms wrapped around my head and sheltered me from the coldness of this place.
God did I hate how he had grown to know me so well.
No matter how often I lost my shit and acted like a bitch, he had stopped fighting me long ago. Instead, he held me, knowing full well I was madder at myself for letting my strength slip, than at him or anything else, really. He just stood there, strong for the both of us until I was ready to meet reality head-on again.
“Did you choose our child? And don’t tell me you want to adopt them all because you know it’s not possible.”
“It’s so hard to decide.” Came muffled through his arms. “Why do they have to classify them like this?”
“We need warriors to replenish our forces, Eden, so we can continue to protect Earth and all the other planets who rely on us. Most are not fit to join the warrior stratum.”
“That doesn’t make them worthless. You have the technology to give them fully functional limbs and organs. Torin, please…” I cried, begged. “Please do something. Give them an equal fighting chance.”
“This crop is severely compromised, Eden,” he said. “Most are defective.”
“They call you defective, don’t they?” I rose onto my toes and stroked both hands through his soft hair. “How does that feel, Torin? Because I can tell you’re not defective. And neither are they. You proved it, now help them prove the same.”
His eyes narrowed above trembling lips, and a deep inhale heaved into his lungs only to come out a stuttered exhale. “Anam ghail de min, if I interfere, then I’m putting us all at risk. I am not all-powerful, and neither am I invincible.”
Arms tense, elbows locked, I could tell he expected me to shout at him, slap him, push him. To blame him for every ounce of unfairness in this world. But I was done with that.
I took a breath deeper than any other before it. “I understand.”
A kiss onto my forehead, then he grabbed a pair of gloves from the cart and worked his fingers into them. “Tell me what to do.”
He stood there in front of me, hands resting on his hips, ready to go through this harvest by my side. The gesture spread warm over my skin, making me wonder if fate might have been right all along. What if I could love this man?
“Can you check which ones are the babies in distress?” I asked. “I know the main panel can mark the exowombs with abnormal heart range and meconium in the amniotic fluid, but I can’t read it.”
“I’ll try.”
We walked over to the control panel, and he swiped through the holograms with narrowed eyes. “Can you see anything?”
I gazed around the Vault. “No.”
He cursed low in Vetusian. “How about now?”
“That’s it, look!” I pointed at the pulsing of light coming from the metal arms, marking each exowomb with a distressed fetus inside. “Come with me and grab those towels from there!”
I hurried to the first child and accessed the holographic control panel, swiping through the signs like I had seen Nifal do it. The drain gulped.
“Sanitize your gloves over there,” I said and did the same. “Then grab a blanket and drape it over your arms. Form them like a cradle.”
“A what?”
“Like this.” I positioned his arms, then helped him drape the fabric over it. “Once I hand him over, you just let go with one hand and rub him all over with the blanket. Quick strokes, and not too soft.”
“You want me to hold a child?”
“Please don’t freak out on me now.” I opened the exowomb, grabbed into the hover cart behind me for a clamp, cut the umbilical cord, and carefully carried the boy from machine to a trembling arm. “There. Hold him tight with one arm and use the other to rub him down.”
Doubt framed green eyes. “What if I hurt him?”
“Bullshit.” I draped the cloth over the boy and placed Torin’s hand on top, showing him how to shove it around. “Strong. Birth isn’t a walk in the park, and he can feel that. It’ll raise his heart rate.”
Shaky fingers almost made the child vibrate underneath his fingers, but Torin did as told, rubbing the red-cheeked boy all over.
I waved over a healer. “Tell him to take the child away. And we need a new hover cart for the next one.”
Torin issued orders, following me from one marked exowomb to the next. One after another, the pulsing of the metal arms faded away as we harvested those babies in distress, buying them the time they needed to fight for life.
“Ready?” I asked, lifting the next one-armed boy from the exowomb, his neuroplate soiled with meconium. “Be gentle with the skin around the metal, and don’t rub the nerve connectors.”
Torin worked the corner of the blanket over the child’s chest, the rubbery scar running down his sternum, a telltale sign of bionic lungs, perhaps even a heart.
“We make a great team,” I said, doing a quick count of the eight lights still pulsing, although a healer just now started to tend to one of them. “I wish we would have —”
“Eden, something’s wrong with this child.”
“What?” His words shaved my heart, peeling it in stripes and layers. “What do you mean something’s wrong? Put him inside the bowl.”
“Is he even breathing?” Torin carefully lowered the Vetusian into the bowl, the edges of his lips already turning a faint purple.
The hover cart beeped, sending a stabbing pain into my chest. “What is it saying? Heart something… I can’t read the rest. Tell me now!”
“Cardiac arrest.”
Tears blurred my vision, but I quickly blinked them away.
You got this.
You have experience with this.
“Hold him still and brace against my pressure.” I placed two fingers at the center of the baby’s chest, right where his scar ended. “Call a healer and tell them we need epinephrine. Or adrenaline. Or whatever you use to raise the heart rate.”
Torin’s voice vibrated through the Vault, but all I could hear were the numbers in my head as I quickly counted the compressions against the child’s chest. I enclosed his mouth with mine, including his nose, and watched how his chest rose as I gave him my breath. Another set of compressions followed.
A healer soon walked up to us with a small pin clasped between his stiff fingers. Whatever he gave the child worked within seconds, and the boy’s chest began to jerk just as I stopped breathing for him a second time.
“Rub him!” I shouted. “Rub, rub, rub.”
Torin rubbed the child, his eyes going wide the moment I slipped out of the sleeves on my dress, making his head turn toward the healer with a bark. “Turn around!”
I took the child from his arms, lining up his scarred chest with the warm embrace of mine. “Put a fresh blanket on him.”
Nostrils flared, my mate did as he was told, but not without glancing over his shoulder to keep stares from half-naked breasts. I wrapped the blanket around the baby and pressed him against me, cradling his head, feeling his fingers shove over me stronger with each second.
I rubbed the blanket over his bum and shoved my nose over his peachy forehead, taking in the scent of fading sweetness. “This is the one we’ll keep.”
“Eden, he —”
“Don’t you dare t
ell me he’s defective, or broken, or unlikely to thrive.”
He bit his lips, his jawline tense, and although he didn’t do it, I could tell he wanted to shake his head. “Why bind yourself to a child so unlikely to survive? He was dead already. Why set yourself up for heartbreak?”
I stared at him, an unspoken plea on my lips. “Because no child is ever defective or broken in the eyes of a mother, Torin.”
Chapter 22
Torin
It was astonishing how a child would escape death one day, only to scream with the force of a grown Vetusian for the following five.
I stared down at Gabriel, the shouts coming from his blotchy face gnawing on my nerves. They filled my chest with a vile pressure, making me feel completely and utterly useless. What was I supposed to do with this frail creature?
“Eden!”
The shower responded in her stead, splashing and gulping while the infant grew increasingly restless. His legs kicked, his eyes scrunched up, and tears streamed along the outline of his reddened lips.
Trembling hands to head and body, I picked him up and rocked him, much in the way I had seen Eden do it. And yet the child continued to cry, perhaps even louder, turning my lungs into a heaving mess of anxiety.
I mumbled a thousand curses in whichever language came to mind.
My feet paced the bedroom.
My patience wore distressingly thin.
How was I supposed to raise this baby to maturity if I couldn’t even calm him now? A terrible tingle crept up my spine, like a thousand pinpricks between my vertebras. You can’t raise a child. You’re a —
“What’s going on here?” Eden stepped out of the cleaning chamber a towel wrapped around her body.
“What does he want?” I asked, might have shouted it given the way she flinched. “I watched you feeding him before you showered, and yet he has demands. No matter how hard I try, he just… just… you take him.”
I reached my arms out to her, Gabriel dangling stiffly from my hands, my palms sweaty against his soft shirt. But Eden didn’t take him. Instead, she wrapped her arms around us, making a shudder tremble through my bones.