Reid indicated the pod, now shaped back into a slat, for her to sit. Clara rubbed her arms and for the second time that day, she sat her ass down where he told her to.
He hadn’t bothered putting on a lab coat as he stood before her, handing her a thin glass and metal box with a tablet screen on top. “These are your choices.”
Clara glanced at them, not reading any of the descriptions, before shoving it back into his hands. “Okay.”
“You don’t want to look at them?” he asked, amusement in his tone, and canted his head.
“No. The first one. My kid is going to be perfect no matter what. It doesn’t matter what super cyber DNA he has, he’s mine.” She didn’t mention how much she didn’t want to have this conversation with him. Not after what had just happened and especially not now that his erection remained visible and was almost at eye level with her.
“All right,” he chuckled and picked something from the box at random. She closed her eyes tightly against her budding curiosity.
This is it.
Reid turned away and plopped the tube he held into a machine. The slight clink and the buzzing receptacle made everything there was between them nerve-shatteringly clinical.
When he turned back toward her, he looked at her strangely.
“The sperm you chose—”
“I don’t want to know.” She made a face, looking everywhere but at the elephant in the room and his hard-on.
“Has cellular technology for enhanced senses.”
Clara frowned and his smile widened.
“Your son will be born with perfect sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. But then again,” he lifted his shoulder, “all the sperm in that box does that. Would you like to know more?”
Bastard baited me.
He moved to her side and adjusted her seat to tip back, the bottom raised, and pushed at her hips, while the rest shifted until she was making a shallow U-shape, knees still bent and lower legs hanging off the end. She took a deep breath and refused the let the position make her feel vulnerable.
Because she was damningly vulnerable.
“He’ll be healthy for life and strong, that’s all I need to know. He’ll be a bipedal human being and have a long life. An education that others would kill for and a mother who loves him more than anything in this universe and the next. He’ll have a family.”
“Hmm.” Reid rubbed his thumb over his lower lip, bringing back his talking kisses to the forefront of her mind. “He’s lucky. Generally, cybernetic beings don’t have families.”
His face shifted and he looked sad, haunted for a moment, but then it was gone. She wondered if his childhood was like hers.No. It was worse. He didn’t have a childhood.
“Maybe they should,” she said without thinking.
“Maybe now, but during wartime, no. Having a family was a nightmare. The kind you can’t wake up from.”
She reached out and grabbed his hand, squeezing it. “It’s not wartime anymore, Reid. Hasn’t been—”
“—For forty-three years, eighteen days, twelve hours, and sixteen minutes since Lysander ended it. Still feels like yesterday.”
Clara never heard of this Lysander. She remembered learning about that final battle where the Trentian colony ship, filled with hundreds-of-thousands of aliens had exploded, blipped from existence. There was no video of it, no feed, only that the location of the event was classified and that those who knew where it had happened, said not even rubble remained. The Cyborgs caused it. The survivors, the only ones, those Cyborgs, still lived.
“Were you there?”
She let go of his hand but he kept it trapped.
“No.”
“Was he your family?”
Reid laughed again. “I don’t have any family.”
