“That’s brilliant, Jen. What if we said the baby died mysteriously?” asked Doryu.
“Ugh I’d hate to lie about that sweet girl dying.”
“Don’t be superstitious,” said Alexander.
I chortled. “I’d think that, as leader of the entire Unseen world, you’d believe in superstitions and omens more than anyone.”
He waved my words away. “Are you sure you don’t know if the babies were made with cloning or artificial copulation?”
“Artificial copulation?” I didn’t correct him. He was a hoot. “No, they didn’t say.”
Doryu clapped his hands together. “Okay let’s go tell Kelly the lie!”
“Slow down,” replied Alexander. “We haven’t gotten our scientist yet, and we need to have a small force prepared to go through their portal into the place the babies are being kept in case they have guards there.”
“We need to try to figure out where in the world they are while we’re there, too,” I said. “Maybe we can go back with a vengeance and squash this war once and for all.”
“I wouldn’t call it a war,” said Alexander.
“Then you need to wake up. They’re making an army. They want war.” I was tired of pussyfooting around. It was time to getthingsdone.
“Okay, I’ve got two possibilities for scientists. Would you care to look over the files?”
I agreed, and he went to the filing cabinet to get the fact sheets on the people that could save the children. I opened the files and studied the faces in the grainy pictures probably pulled from the internet, but they didn’t tell me anything.
The first was a man in his seventies. He’d been on the team in Scotland to clone the first mammals. He had a passel of kids and grandkids, and lived an idyllic life, at least on paper.
The next was a woman who worked at the hospital where they’d successfully birthed a lamb from an artificial womb. She was young, childless, and pivotal to the project, according to the articles he’d found.
“There are more options, but based on current projects they’re working on, education, and project history, I liked these two best,” Alexander explained.
“I’d say her. The babies are already cloned. We need to grow them to successful births.” Plus I hated the idea of kidnapping someone with all those kids. Having to kidnap someone at all was bad enough. “You’re not going to kill her when you’re done are you?”
“No, I told you, she’ll be the first human we’re trying the spell on.”
“I won’t be a part of killing someone innocent,” I said in my hardest voice.
“Nor will I,” said Doryu.
“I’m trying, I really am.” Alexander looked weary. He needed a shave. His whiskers were especially dark on his extra pale face. “It’s slow going, but I won’t sanction any more unnecessary killing. Now, let’s get the ball rolling.”
With a plan in place, however tentative, everything moved quickly. Alexander was a master of delegation. He had a team in place within hours to seek out the scientist, bring her to the headquarters, and convince her of our immense need. One thing I knew, her life would never be the same.
At the same time, we banged out our story about Linna. I knew I’d hate lying about her health, but it seemed the most plausible story to get Kelly to run to her leader, whoever he was.
Alexander took care of notifying anyone relevant to the plan. It was on a need to know basis, in case someone within the Junta council was compromised.
Three days passed before everything was ready. Roan came to my room to let me know. “Hey, Jen,” he said after sticking his head in the door to make sure I was there. He’d gotten a haircut. His locks looked more brown than dark blonde when they were short.
“Where’ve you been?” I hadn’t seen him since he’d found me in Alexander’s bed.
I was watching a movie on the TV, using a DVD player I’d brought from my apartment. I planned to take it to the new school, but in the meantime, it relieved the boredom in the evenings when I was done working at the school.
“I had to go help a shifter out of some legal trouble. Someone saw him shifted and turned him in for having an exotic animal, had video proof and everything that he was keeping a pure white tiger in his trailer in Louisiana.” He rolled his eyes and climbed into the bed with me.
“How’d you help? And if money is no object, why a trailer?”
“I finally convinced the judge the video was altered. We had him shift and put him in a big cage and uploaded it from a server in another country. Then we showed the tiger to the judge and how the stripe patterns were identical. The guy who saw him had to be removed from the courtroom, he was so mad.”
