Page 14 of The Program

Her breath stalled and her face turned an alarming shade of purple. ‘Don’t tell me something if it’s not true.’

I cupped her face in my hands and pinned her with my gaze.‘I promise,L. I’m going to get him back.’

‘What aboutourbabies?’ an unfamiliar voice called out from somewhere behind Libby.

I glanced over to see a small hole had been dug out of the rubble for me to be pulled out, and a crowd of around two dozen women surrounded us. I vaguely remembered freeing the other prisoners before I smashed and burned everything I could get my hands on, but I had been so lost in my own fury that I hadn’t paid attention to their faces.

The Program kept us in pairs until they started the breeding program in which they separated those pairs to make room for the babies with their mothers. Libby and I were an exception, my circumstances a little different from the others.

I was also the only one here who didn’t have a child and, from the looks of it, wasn’t pregnant. Varying stages of rounded bellies surrounded me from all angles, and I followed them up to the myriad emotions displayed on the multitude of faces. Some were angry, some confused, and others were still panicked. A few gazed down at me and Libby with concern, but all of them were generally uncaring when it came to anyone but themselves and their partners.

Our pairs were our families, and anyone outside of that didn’t matter. Not here.

But as I stared at the other women, counting the possibilities in my head, I knew I wouldn’t get away with only freeing Baldr. I would never be able to come back here and face them if I didn’t have their children, too.

But there was only one of me and… if each woman only had one child, twenty-four babies. And that was the bare minimum. I was going to need some help, but I couldn’t allow these mothers to put themselves in harm’s way while they were still growing new life inside themselves.

This wasn’t going to be good.

‘The first thing we need to do before we can even think about saving them is find somewhere safe to lie low,’ Libby spoke up, saving me from the awkward silence that had ensued when I didn’t immediately have an answer.

‘Why can’t we just stay here?’ one of the more heavily pregnant women asked.

‘Becausetheywill come looking for us here, you dumb bitch,’ answered someone else from the opposite side of the circle.

‘They’ll discover what happened here sooner rather than later,’ agreed another. A red-headed woman with an abundance of freckles and a barely protruding bump.SheI vaguely recognised as the woman I’d handed Libby to before I went back in to burn shit down. ‘We need to move.’

‘I don’t know where the‘we’is coming from, but there’s no way I’m sticking around with you lot,’ said a darker-skinned woman with large curly hair and a prominent bump. She was holding hands with another woman with a similar complexion, and I wondered if skin-tone was a factor in how we’d been paired.

‘Especially not withthatWack job,’ her friend said, pointing at me.

Harsh…

‘No one’s stopping you from leaving,’ Libby interrupted in an attempt to de-escalate the tension before a fight ensued. ‘You’re welcome to go your own way, no one will get in your way, but I think it’s best if we stick together. Working together can only end up in our favour.’

‘If you leave now, how will you get your children back?’ asked a different woman, though she was behind me so I didn’t see who spoke.

‘If I leave it up to this psycho, I’m definitely never seeing them again.’

‘And what about if we don’t want them?’ one woman asked, an Asian woman clutching onto a female that shared the same features. Sister? No… They looked too similar. Twins, perhaps?

Her words finally registered, and the group collectively gasped in shock. ‘But they’re your children,’ the redhead reminded them as if they didn’t already know.

‘We didn’t choose to have children. We never wanted them. They were never going to let us keep them, anyway, so why should we want to now?’ the other twin argued.

It was a fair point, though I didn’t think I could ever imagine abandoning my own child. Even if Bal wasn’t mine biologically he was stillmine.And even ifhehad succeeded in knocking me up, I would have loved that child regardless.

But at the end of the day none of these women had a say in the matter, and the choice was further taken from them alongside their children. If they chose to protect their hearts by rejecting their unwanted offspring, who was I to judge?

But that then raised the question of what to do with those unwanted children. If I was saving one, I was saving them all. I didn’t know how, yet, but I would figure it out.

First, however…

I stood, pulling Libby up with me. ‘We need to move. If you’re leaving, go now. Otherwise, let’s find somewhere relatively safe to sleep until we can find somewhere more permanent and secure.’

‘She’s right,’ the redhead agreed. ‘If we’re going to get our kids back we’ll need somewhere to bring them back to.’

I took that as my cue to take in our surroundings for the first time. I had arrived here unconscious and this would be the first time I got to see outside.

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