THIRTY-ONE #2
Xeon shifts closer, frost and steel cutting cleanly through the sweetness leaking from me like a broken faucet I can’t turn the fuck off. Quietly, he tells me, “Your feet are on the floor. The table is in front of you. No one is behind you except for us.”
Not pity. Just facts.
Ewan slips his headphones off and holds them out, not touching me. “Want the noise to disappear?”
My eyes drop to them but the room is too loud. Machines humming. Paper sliding. Guards breathing. My pulse. My scent. My father’s name still screaming silently from the file.
I don’t take the headphones, but I also don’t tell him to move them away. He waits, and I hate them a little. All of them. For knowing how to stand close without making me feel caught.
My fingers curl into my palms until my nails bite into the skin with a grounding pain that helps me focus. Then I ask, “What is this?”
The room grows quiet. Too quiet.
Mercer closes the file halfway, like he knows leaving the name exposed is cruel. Then he says, “That’s part of the original NOVAC fertility research archive.”
Fertility. Such a neat, clean little word for bodies turned into battlefields.
“Omega research,” I say bluntly.
“Yes.”
“Say it properly,” I snap.
Mercer’s brows pinch, and I lift my gaze back to his.
“Omega bodies,” I say, voice thin and sharp enough to cut. “Omega pregnancies. Omega heats. Omega survival rates. Omega extinction. Omega everything. Don’t dress it up just because the folder has a fucking label.”
Silence follows, and then Mercer nods. “You’re right.”
That almost knocks me off balance, just because I expected defense. Scientists absolutely love defense. Governments love defense. Men with files love explaining why words are too complicated for the people whose lives were ruined by them.
Mercer only looks tired.
“The archive holds only research on Omega reproductive failure, heat destabilization, pregnancy loss, and the attempted stabilization therapies that became NOVAC,” the doctor then explains.
Became.
Not led to, not contributed to, but became. And my father’s name sits on top of it.
My stomach twists violently, so much so that I almost bend with it.
No.
No, he was trying to help. He... he was trying to save people. Save Mom. Save me. Save all of us. He couldn’t have known. He... he couldn’t have.
Except good intentions often have bodies too. They rot just like everything else.
Hale watches me too closely. “You recognize the name?”
“No,” I say, but the word comes out too quickly. Again.
Someone should seriously take my mouth away from me until it perfects the art of subtlety, because right now it fucking sucks.
Fletcher doesn’t react, and Kaito doesn’t turn around. Xeon looks at the floor like my lie is just another piece of furniture, and Ewan puts the headphones down on the table next to me, close enough for me to choose them if I want them.
Mercer studies me for a long second, but he doesn’t call it on me, and there’s the third reason. Maybe.
“I knew Conrad O’Reilly,” he eventually says.
My lungs forget how to do the only job they have.
Dad.
Not Doctor. Not O’Reilly. Just Conrad.
“I worked under him before NOVAC went public. Before the emergency approvals. Before everything got shoved past ethics and into panic.”
His mouth tightens.
“He believed he was saving people.”
That sentence hits worse than any kind of accusation could, because I know.
I fucking know. My dad used to fall asleep at the kitchen table with charts under his cheek because he wouldn’t stop working.
Mom would rub his shoulders, and Maine used to steal all of his pens.
I used to draw on his notes until he laughed and told me my monsters had very good clinical instincts.
He believed he was saving people, and maybe that’s how the world ended.
Not because someone set out to destroy it, but because someone wanted to rescue it so badly that they stopped asking what that rescue would cost.
The heat under my skin pulses harder, and my scent slips again. Wild honey and rain, sharpened by panic.
One of the guards inhales and Fletcher turns his head slowly. Not a threat, but a warning. It works, too, because the guard looks away.
Hale doesn’t, though. His eyes narrow.
Shit.
Mercer notices the wrong thing at the right time. “Commander, if you want answers, maybe stop letting armed men stare at injured survivors like they’re puzzles.”
Hale’s gaze cuts to him. “Careful.”
“No,” Mercer answers mildly. “We messed up six years ago. I’m not too keen on doing it again.”
I stare at him.
That isn’t funny, but it almost is. Hell, even Ewan’s mouth is twitching.
Valeria looks like she’s only seconds away from developing a headache with everyone’s names written on it.
Mercer opens another folder, slower this time, turning it so the contents face us. It’s all graphs, trial notes, and subject categories.
OMEGA STABILIZATION RESPONSE.
HEAT SUPPRESSION FAILURE.
GENETIC MARKER VARIANCE.
My eyes lock on to that last phrase. Marker. Blood marker. NOVAC marker.
They can follow reaction.
“What marker?” I ask. Mercer goes still and Hale’s head turns. There. Too much interest. Idiot mouth. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Then I add, “The pilot said it. Blood marker. NOVAC marker. I want to know what Vector was talking about before they follow it straight through your fancy wall.”
That saves it.
Maybe?
Mercer taps the page once, not eagerly. Never eagerly. “Some Omega lines responded differently to the early stabilizers. Stronger immune adaptation. Stronger scent volatility. Stronger reproductive resilience. NOVAC called them marker-positive.”
My skin grows cold under the heat.
Marker-positive.
The words don’t sound like science. They sound like a cage being named before someone even builds it.
“Positive,” I repeat.
Mercer’s expression darkens. “Clinical term. Not a moral one.”
“Cute distinction,” I throw at him.
“I know.”
No. No he doesn’t know. But maybe he knows just enough to hate the same thing.
Hale steps forward. “Can Vector track marker-positive subjects?”
Subjects.
Oh, that word cuts enough to make someone bleed, and Kaito’s hand moves. Not to a weapon, because he doesn't have one. But his whole body changes, burning wood and worn flannel thickening through the air, controlled and furious.
Fletcher’s voice turns flat. “Careful with that word.”