Page 62 of Veiled Vixen

Various medical instruments become active and I have to turn away after that.

I don’t want to see this. I don’t care how much I hate her, no one wants to be seen in this kind of situation. And if she were awake she would be screaming for me to get out.

I lean against the wall and stare out into the large living room as the loud, buzzing medical instruments inside the autosurgeon do their thing.

The bot appears beside me and begins to chirp and I find myself wishing for Veila’s wristband.

Just as I think that, the bot reaches out to touch my shoulder. I look up into his spherical face and then he turns and takes off across the room, disappears down a hallway, then comes back holding another wristband.

I take it when he offers. But the screen doesn’t light up with text. This wristband has a voice translator.

“She will be unconscious for several hours,” he says. His voice is low and even. Almost without emotion. “Would you like to go back to your station?”

“No,” I say. “But shouldn’t we call someone for her? Isn’t there a doctor here?”

“No. Aside from you and her, there are no humans on this ship at all.”

“What?” I admit, I’m a little taken aback at that revelation. “No humans at all? Just borgs and bots? She has no family, then?”

“Just me,” the bot says.

I don’t know why this bothers me so much, but it does. If I were hurt I would hope that Luck and Crux would at least be notified. And if one of them were hurt I’d want to know too.

When Luck and I got hurt out on the salvaging jobs we never called home and told people about it unless it was serious. Like that one time Luck almost got his head cut off by that woman at Fornax Station. I didn’t call anyone though. I just put him in Lady’s medical pod and we came here to Harem for treatment.

I thought he was gonna die that time.

But that was the only time. Otherwise Luck would fix me up, or I’d fix him up, and that would be the end of it. But we had Lady and Beauty. We were our own family of sorts.

So it bothers me that Veila has no one but this bot.

“What’s happening to her?” I ask. It’s not an entirely dumb question. I get it. She’s miscarrying those babies. But it seems more serious than that and I want to know why.

“She’s been through this before. She’ll recover,” the bot says.

He didn’t really answer my question but I don’t ask again.

I might not know Veila very well. Hell, I hardly know her at all. But I get that she would not want me knowing her private medical history. Even if I am her soulmate.

It’s not a real bond, anyway. We’re not in love. We’re not even in lust.

Is it weird that I don’t really have the same urges for her as my brothers do for their fated princesses?

Maybe.

I glance over my shoulder and immediately wish I hadn’t. There’s a lot of blood on the autosurgeon table. Veila’s head is tilted to the side, facing me, and there’s a tube down her throat. Her body is listless. Lifeless. And it jerks back and forth as the autosurgeon performs the procedure between her legs.

I turn to the bot, feeling sick. “Is there anything I can do? I don’t know what to do.”

“You should go home. There’s nothing you can do. She will wake up in a few hours and she will not want you to be here. I didn’t think she was this close to the end when I let you in here.” He pauses. Sighs.

“The end.”

“This is always the final outcome when she’s pregnant.”

Which reminds me of something Veila said earlier about Corla.

She was probably pregnant dozens of times before she ever left the Cygnian System.

That’s what they do to us.

Starting at age eleven.

I walk over to the dark blue, half-circle couch and take a seat with my back to the open door of the medical center. I prop my elbows on my knees and lean my head forward into my hands, wondering how life got this way.

How did I get here? How did we all get here?

The sounds of the operation fades and then ceases. And I know that the bot has closed the door to the medical center.

And when I straighten up and look over my shoulder—he’s gone.

But he stayed with her, I realize. And that makes me feel a little better.