Page 40 of Challenged

“I know that’s what they were doing,” she says. “Because they tried to breed me.”

She tells me the story, brief and blunt and horrifying.

“That’s…” There are no words to soften what she just said, so I don’t even try. “So you’re afraid they’re going to restart the program again if we call them back out here? Use all of us as their test subjects?”

I’d honestly kind of forgotten about the breeding program being the reason I was brought out here, too caught up in the knowledge that it was all lies and it never should have happened to me, anyway.

Except it isn’t lies. And twenty years down the line, is Mercenia going to care that it shouldn’t have happened to me? I’ve been gone all that time, considered dead. Would they resurrect me? Or just re-enrol me…

One of those is a lot easier than the other, and Mercenia is all about the easy path.

Fuck.

“Mercenia would definitely restart the program,” Liv says. “Starting with taking the kids we already have.”

I shake my head. “Liv, you’ve been here about six months, and you look about six months along. You must have got pregnant before you arrived here. Just before. Lorna, too.”

“I wasn’t pregnant when I got here.”

“Most women don’t realise until they’re five or six weeks along. I can see how the timing might look like it lines up, but you were probably just too early into it to notice any of the signs.”

Liv shakes her head at me. “I wasn’t pregnant before I got here. I wasn’t with anyone before, for starters. I was getting a whole lot of nothing back home. This is Gregar’s baby.”

I don’t quite catch the sound of disbelief before it escapes my mouth. Liv doesn’t look pissed at me though, more amused.

“Brooks,” she says, “would you fetch Sally for me, please?”

“Sure,” Brooks says, leaving the room.

My eyes cut to the mouse now she’s no longer here to stop me grabbing for it. Liv notices me looking and arches her brows at me, as if to say, ‘what are you going to do, then?’ I sit back in my chair, keeping my hands in my lap. Quite apart from the dawning realisation that contacting Mercenia might not be thebest plan, I’m not about to get into a physical altercation with a pregnant lady.

“Look,” I say. “I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of what was going on here, but clearly the experiment wasn’t viable.”

“What makes you say that?” Liv says.

“Uh, the fact that this place has been abandoned. If they were running a breeding program and they made it work, I’d be forty something with fifteen half raskarran kids by now. They left, ergo, they didn’t make it work. So why would you, twenty years later, no science tier team working with you, be able to make it work when they couldn’t?”

“The dreamspace,” Liv answers, as if it’s a blindingly obvious answer, and she can’t understand why I can’t see it.

“The dreamspace?”

“Raskarrans don’t have casual relationships the way humans do, and their fertility cycle works differently, too. They have mates. They meet in the dreamspace. They only sleep with their mates and only their mates cause their mating node to activate, allowing for impregnation.”

I blink. “Rardek didn’t mention any of that.”

Liv snorts. “Rardek is one of the more… worldly, let’s say, of the raskarrans. Most of them would have happily told you everything without realising they were freaking you out. Rardek is clever enough to know that overloading you wasn’t the best approach.”

My head spins with so many thoughts about that. I squash them all down, push them aside to examine later. What Rardek has and hasn’t said to me is irrelevant to the point I’m trying to make.

“So they have a moral structure within their society,” I say. “They only sleep with their mates, so mating nodes, whatever they are, only ever have the opportunity to work with theirmates. Going into the dreamspace - I’m not going to pretend to know how that works - but it’s obviously some sort of physiological process. Male sees female, male likes female, male triggers dreamspace connection. That makes them mates, which means they then have the opportunity for mating nodes to work and therefore get to make babies.”

“The raskarrans believe Lina places them in dreams. They don’t choose it.”

I huff. “Religion is what we use to explain things that can’t be explained with science yet. These guys are hunter gatherers. They aren’t going to be scientifically advanced enough to know how their own biology works.”

“Or there really is a forest goddess.”

She says it so lightly, as if daring me to disagree with her again. It’s clearly what she believes, and I don’t want to ruin what little progress I’ve made towards friendliness with her by shitting on her beliefs.

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