Calico Descending by Keri Lake

Author:Keri Lake
Language: eng
Format: epub

“Clever girl. Clever. Clever. Clever.” In spite of the smile on his face, the ire is clearly burning a hole through Doctor Ericsson’s patience, evident in the bite of his tone. “Well, we can’t send you off to Titus. He won’t come near you without the blessing of Valdys. Which means, you win. You win, and Valdys will get you all to himself.”

Frowning, I lift my gaze to his. “I win?” Fingers curled around the chair, I shift in a poor attempt to shake off the burgeoning anger and lean forward. “I win? I have the choice of getting impregnated by an Alpha, so you can use him, or get strapped to a gurney in a slow, agonizing death! But I win?”

“There is the alternative of feeding you alive to the Ragers, so you’d do well to mind your tone.”

I fall back into the chair, slumping in defeat. No matter how I spin this game, in the end, Calico wins. Calico always wins. “Why me? Why am I the only one who’s had successful binding?”

“Technically, Neela did, as well. But I suspect it has to do with your genetics. There may be some ancestral DNA linked to the chemical structure of the pathogen. Who knows? The science is so new, we don’t yet have the answers. Which is what makes it so exciting!”

There’s nothing exciting about it, but I don’t dare stoke his anger by telling him so.

“Calithea …” The sound of my name from his mouth is strange. He’s never once called me by anything other than subject, girl, or my number. “If we find the cure, we can save thousands of people. Imagine if your mother had been given access to a vaccine before she threw herself to those Ragers.”

I made the mistake in the early days of telling him the story of my mother. Thinking it might help make me look more human in his eyes, instead of another savage to poke and prod. I regret giving him the opportunity to use her against me. “What makes you so sure the cure is still below? And if you are so sure, why don’t you just force him to go? Why go through this stupid exercise of making him care about something?”

“Because it’s only when we care about something that we do our job well. We’ve sent Alphas below before.”

“How? I thought the tunnels were sealed off.”

“The main entrance to the tunnels is sealed, but we discovered a ventilation shaft, through which we were able to send them down with success. The Alphas found living amongst Ragers, or being torn apart by them, as the case may be, was more inviting than having to return to their cells. They had nothing to come back to.”

“I don’t want to be the reason Valdys risks his life for you.”

“You don’t have a choice. You already are.”

“So, why bother to impregnate me, then?”

“It’s what he wants. It’s what our species, as a whole, wants. To leave behind a legacy. To let the world know we were here and that we were seen.

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