Galaxy of Exiles book 2 - Bile and Blood

Chapter Two

Ferrash tried to ignore the way his hands shook as he clipped the ends of his belt together, but his mind fixated on it. The shaking was a sign of weakness. A sign he'd taken too many emotional inhibitors. A sign of how messed up things had become in the depths of his subconscious. And, as sights went, it was the safest one in the room.

Rustling sounded from the bed behind him. The woman's breathing – heavy, but fast being wrested to normality – cut a sawblade through the silence.

Ferrash gritted his teeth and reached over to a small side table for his pistol and coat. The contents of his stomach made a foray into his throat, and he did all he could not to throw up the little he'd eaten that day. It was just the drugs. Too many inhibitors, combined with whatever they'd given him to get through this. That was all. He shrugged into his coat, gripped his pistol tight enough to ground himself in reality.

His obligation here was done. His years of dodging the breeding programme were over, but maybe now he'd participated, the Protectorate would wait a few years before asking again. With any luck, the programme wouldn't exist by then anyway. The sooner he left and put it behind him, the better.

'Are you unwell?' the woman behind him asked.

Ferrash curled his fingers in the air halfway to the door membrane, then dropped his hand and glanced over his shoulder.

The attendant stood bathed in the murky amber of the room's lighting panels, her eyes flat, reflecting most of it back at him. Her expression held no curiosity, as there had been none in her voice. She stepped back into her underwear with an almost robotic precision.

'I'm well, Attendant,' Ferrash said. A part of him barely recognised his own voice, an intentionally dull monotone.

The attendant – one of the more junior ranks of keeper, though a keeper nonetheless – paused with one trouser leg on, one off. 'There is a troubled note to you. If you are not in your right mind, the process may have been inefficient. You should recentre yourself so there may be a second attempt.'

'That won't be necessary.' He caught himself before he thought on her words too much. 'Any trouble on my part won't have affected the results.' Besides, he had other duties to attend to.

'You took longer than expected.'

On detecting a slight hesitation in her words, Ferrash regarded her more closely. Her white-flecked eyebrows had dipped a fraction lower, and her posture struck him as... not vulnerable, but uncertain. For a second, he saw Palia's face in hers, but the image vanished in the time it took to drum across the surface of his heart.

It was the attendant's first time in the programme. Any descendant of an empyrric bloodline had to participate – her as a full-blooded empyrric, Ferrash with an empyrric mother. The Keepers needed to keep their numbers strong, and empyrrics could only be born naturally, not created in the vats. Hence the breeding programme. The act they had just done was illegal for any other purpose in the Protectorate.

So of course she didn't know how it was supposed to work. The preparatory material boiled down to a minute-long projection with scientific annotations and blunt instructions. She'd probably had the splitting thing playing in her implants through it all. Biology didn't like sticking to scripts.

Ferrash cleared his throat, pushing the thought to the back of his mind. 'Time taken doesn't impact anything as long as the criteria were satisfied.'

She said nothing, but if Ferrash were a keeper like her, he'd surely have seen doubt radiating from her.

'It just doesn't work like that.' He almost said trust me, but experience wasn't the best admission, given the circumstances.

The attendant pulled her robe from its hook on the wall, so he made for the door, but he didn't miss her final words.