Page 72 of The Program

When he groaned again, the sound painfully tortured and followed by a weak cough, Henrik rushed forward to check on him. Dorian and Urman were quick to tag after, but I chose to stay behind with Foryk. T… wait, no…Tormikdidn’t even deign to look up, and Artemis took a few eager steps towards her awakening friend before suddenly thinking better of it and stopping. She didn’t move back, but she didn’t move towards him, either.

I shot her a questioning look that she received and her answer was to gesture towards herself, taking an added beat to cup her breasts. Ah. He didn’t know she was a woman yet. I forgot about that.

‘…Dar…a…’ he rasped, and Henrik placed his palm over our wounded friend’s forehead as he shushed him, checking his temperature.

It was the first time I’d allowed myself a proper look at Reece, my attention previously divided between the rest of the chaos while he slept. Now, though, I took in the sickly pallor to his already pale skin and how it looked like transparent parchment paper, the blue of his veins standing out in stark contrast from beneath. His facial hair had grown, a long silvery tangle that rivalled my own beard, only less wriggly. And he’d lost a lot of weight, too. Where before he had been stocky with bulging muscles, not quite to the same degree as the Tornu brothers but close, now he was slim and lean, the deterioration advanced and shocking.

Adara was still sleeping away the hurt on her own metal table. We’d tried to make them a little more comfortable by taking off our jackets, rolling them up as makeshift pillows and draping them over their nudity to protect their dignity, but there wasn’t really much else we could do for them. Artemis said they were going to be okay, and even though I believed her I needed to see it with my own two eyes before that knot in my stomach could untwist.

‘Reece?’ Henrik spoke softly. ‘Reece, can you hear me?’

The silver-haired Yu’Rom mutt let out an indecipherable grunt, but his eyelids slowly fluttered open. He squinted weakly against the brightness of the fluorescent lights, but he peeled them back enough to look at the closest thing we had to a medical professional.

‘H-Henri-k?’ he managed to force out through laboured breaths.

‘Hey, Reece. How ya doin’?’

‘A-dar-a?’ he asked, deflecting and redirecting the question.

‘She’s fine. She’s sleeping over there, see?’ he moved his body out of Reece’s line of sight and pointed at Adara’s sleeping form.

‘Wh-Who…?’ Reece asked, unable to get the question out through a grimace of pain.

‘Who’s here?’ Henrik finished for him. ‘Most of us. My team and yours, plus T, but you haven’t met him yet.’

Reece frowned. ‘A-Arty?’

We all turned to stare expectantly at Artemis. She looked nervous in a way I’d never seen from her before, stepping forward tentatively while wringing her hands in front of her.

‘Hi, Reece,’ she said, her voice soft and a little shaky.

His smile was warm, and his body relaxed at the sight of her. He held his hand out and she rushed forward to hold onto it. ‘Kn-knew y-ou’d c-come… f-for m-e.’

She practically melted at his words and knelt beside him to rest her head against his shoulder. ‘Like I could ever leave you behind,’ she whispered, her voice barely audible but I still caught it. Her tenderness towards him sparked a few questions in my mind about her true feelings for him. Had she developed feelings for him, too, but couldn’t act on it because he wasn’t into men? Was she now his type?

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. On the one hand, she wasmine,but sharing had never been an issue for me. Except I’d never shared someone I loved before. Could I do it if that was what she wanted?

‘You’re quite the sentimental little thing, aren’t you Subject A-173?’ The scientist – Demari – spoke from the doorway, startling us all for a third time. We really needed to keep an eye on the damn door at all times. He never should’ve been able to surprise us in the first place.

We all turned to glare at him, though Foryk and T both took it a step further and growled low in their throats, their gazes murderous. In fact, so was Artemis’s.

‘What do you want now, you piece of shit?’ she snarled.

Why did that turn me on?Not the time, Bromm…

‘You have yet to copulate with the Griknot princeling. I have come to issue your first warning,’ he said.

Okay, so maybe it was the time…

He pulled the holo-tab from his belt again, and my stomach dropped. The last time he’d done that he’d murdered someone a few of us had cared about.

Backtrack… Definitely not the time…

Mirroring our last interaction, a blue-tinted hologram hovered above his screen. Again, it revealed a person bound and at his mercy, only this one was much,muchtinier and strapped to a metal table that was an exact replica of the ones we’d found Reece and Adara shackled to.

Artemis let loose a vicious sound that was somehow both animalistic and mechanical at the same time. ‘Don’t you dare hurt him!’

The tall, lanky scientist didn’t even flinch, his face remaining indifferent as he stared her down with a superiority I wanted to punch out of him. ‘Copulate with the Griknot, or we start his procedures now. Without anaesthesia.’

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