“What?” Kilo asks it, but I would have if he hadn’t first.
Riann looks between us and he says, “Oh… did you not…”know that Kiro’s work started before everything else?
“Our education was provided by a man who chose to give us a highly biased curriculum.” And the CSS left Drift handle the rest once the Maker was dead.
Kilo shrugs and keeps searching. “We were told all of the women were killed by cavrinskh.”
“Some of them were. Some of them left. When you have six-legged monsters trying to eat you and two-legged monsters trying to remove you from every possible part of society they can… well, I’d probably look for something better on a different planet too.”
“What do you mean, remove them?” I look at the data with new questions as Riann points at the screen.
“Those are Sian eggs. Not human ones. They’ve been able to make it work with human embryos… That was the real reason Kiro was removed from all of the projects. He was fanatical.”
“And he wasn’t alone…” Kilo makes a little gagging sound.
“Most of those men are long dead, but it looks like at least a few are still around and working on getting their research back to where it was.”
“That’s what the Fillio Index is for?” I ask. “The viability of their eggs outside of their body?”
“More or less. The bio score is about her overall health and wellbeing when she gets here. The Fillio Index is solely about whether or not she can have children.”
“That’s kind of gross,” Kilo says.
“It’s why they don’t use the index when determining who is eligible to be matched.”
“But they still run it?”
“Yes.” Riann looks away. “It’s background data. The Agency likes their data.”
“Speaking of data…” Kilo transfers his screen to the window in front of us and says, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but these are the outpost layouts, aren’t they?
“I mean… that’s mine.” He points at the one in the lower right corner… “but I don’t know whatthatis.”
There’s an auxiliary entrance and another room that he didn’t know about.
I pull our outpost to the front and expand it.
“Download these, please.”
“Already done.”
My skin crawls as I look at the space that is not what it should be. “Kissu said there were ghosts…” I point at the geomech room. “It looks like someone could have gotten into our outpost at any point they wanted to before we sealed up that door.”
There are three separate tunnels from it, hidden inside the machinery I’ve never bothered to inspect, and a massive room that is marked only as “lab.”
The crawling turns to static and I barely feel my hands as I raise my comm to my ear, hitting the only preset transmission code—Home.
All I get is harried beeping.
“We’re too far underground to get that signal out,” Riann tells us.
“I think we’ve seen enough here. We need to get home. Anything else buried here can wait.”
“Yeah…” Kilo thinks about Bowie and not wanting to leave him alone if someone else could get inside.
“Pack up anything you think we need and?—”
Kilo takes a step back and curses as the power cuts, plunging us into darkness.
