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You must end this madness, the first child said. Please, you must help those of us for which there is no hope. Promise that you will.
I hesitated. Making such a promise would go against the one I'd made to myself so long ago, and yet if I didn't accede to his wishes, I'd only be condemning these children to more pain.
You cannot save us. No one can, he said. All of us will die; it is simply a matter of when, and in how much pain.
His words stirred the memories of melting flesh, and tears stung my eyes. I rapidly blinked them away. I promise.
His form had begun to fade. At first I thought he could simply no longer maintain the fiction of his flesh, but then a smile twisted his lips, and his form began to glow with a warm, golden light.
The tears that had been threatening to tumble finally did; they came not from sadness, but rather relief and happiness.
His soul was being called on. He was being given the chance of rebirth.
It was a gift we déchet would never receive, although I had no idea why. Nuri had forced some of the déchet ghosts haunting a military bunker we’d been investigating onwards, but I very much suspected the place she’d sent them and the place these little souls were being drawn to were two completely different things.
As the second soul also moved on, I raised the dart gun and shot the guard and the two men. None of them registered the attack—the scientists were still trying to bring the second child back to life and the guard was too engrossed in the unfolding drama. I hooked the dart gun onto my utilities belt and waited for the drug to take effect. As the two scientists and the guard collapsed in quick succession, I lunged forward and grabbed the woman by the neck.
“Scream,” I said, as I shed my light shield, “and I will kill you.”
Her eyes went wide and the stink of her fear stained the clinically clean air of the lab, but all she did was nod.
“What are you doing to these children?”
She hesitated. I tightened my grip just a fraction, and she hastily said, “Testing a series of pathogens on them.”
“Wraith pathogens?”
Her eyes went even wider and she all but stammered, “Yes.”
“And the children here? Were they created in this place?”
“No. We bought them.”
Bought them? Why in Rhea would any parent sell his or her own child? “And where exactly does one buy a child’s life?”
“I don’t know!” Her eyes darted desperately for the door, undoubtedly hoping for salvation. “I just work here.”
“And your work involves testing pathogens created from the DNA of the Others on human and shifter babies!” My voice was no louder than hers, but it was filled with the deep anger that coursed through me. The stink of her fear sharpened. “Do you expect any of these children to live?”
She hesitated again. “We do have an extremely high fail rate—”
“Define high.”
“One hundred percent so far.”
Even though that was exactly what the child had said, part of me had hoped it wasn’t the case—that the death toll here wasn’t as bad as the déchet program had been at its worst.
What was she thinking? What were any of them thinking? In the name of Rhea... it was all I could do to not shake her, to not rant and rave at both her stupidity and her inhumanity. To not end her life here and now, just as she and her cohorts had ended the life of who knew how many children—slowly, and painfully.
But there were still things I needed to know. “So you expect all the children here to die?”
“Yes.”
There was no remorse in her voice, not even the slightest hint that she felt anything close to regret for either her actions or for what they were trying to achieve here. Something within me hardened—the same something that had killed the soldier whose uniform I now wore.
“But we do have great hopes for the latest bacterium batch,” she continued. “Subject forty-five certainly hasn’t shown any of the side effects we’ve witnessed previously.”
Which meant forty-four other little ones—including all those within this room—had been forced to bear the unbearable before their deaths. “I gather you’re talking about the little girl on her own?”
