Amaryllis was almost as terrified as she was excited at the prospect of being off ship after months in space.
No one else seemed to share her reservations. When the order came to disembark, the corridor flooded with eager ‘colonists’ of both the hunter and the cyborg variety, although Amaryllis supposed they were all cyborgs now.
Or maybe they’d decided to call themselves something else, she thought a little hysterically?
She was pregnant.
She figured that was reason enough to be battling hysteria even if she wasn’t facing a world she was fairly certain she wasn’t prepared for.
She was still in a state of shock over the realization, still unable to completely accept her suspicions.
She didn’t have to look far for the source, but she still had a hard time accepting that she’d been impregnated by a cyborg.
How had they developed the capability? She knew damn well the company would have made certain they couldn’t reproduce, regardless of the other liberties they’d taken and despite the fact that they’d deliberately developed a human/robotic hybrid.
Did it matter now?
She’d been trying to deny it for weeks, ignoring all the changes in her body that told its own story. She’d almost managed to convince herself that it was pure imagination. After all, she’d never been pregnant before. It seemed more likely that her suspicions could be wrong than that she’d hit on just why she didn’t feel quite as she should. Right? But she knew she could continue trying to deny it until the baby—or whatever it was—was born, and it wasn’t going to change a damn thing. Denial wasn’t going to stop it from happening.
It could’ve been either one of them.
It could’ve been both for all she knew.
She didn’t care. All that mattered was that she was almost certain she had something growing inside of her and she didn’t want it there.
She couldn’t face producing a freak.
She wasn’t about to bring something into the world to go through the hell she’d gone through.
Her parents had always said it was the radiation storms, that they’d had inadequate shielding at a critical time in her development. There’d been a time when she’d believed them, but that was before she’d been facing the possibility of producing some ‘thing’ herself.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d mated with a cyborg. They’d been engineered for excellence, but there had been no expectation that they would reproduce and therefore no concern that their genes could affect future generations. His genes could be as fucked up as her own probably were.
She wanted, desperately, to find a physician who could tell her just how bad it was and remove it if it was as she suspected. She knew that was impossible though. They’d know inside of five minutes that she wasn’t one of them and who knew what would happen?
Her only hope, as far as she could see, was to get on an outbound ship as soon as possible and find help.
Reese and Dante were waiting for her when she finally made her way down the gangplank. If she hadn’t been so distracted, she would’ve been looking for a way to avoid them. As it was, Reese had gripped her arm before she even realized he was there.
She glanced at him and then Dante.
“We have a home. You can stay with us until … until you decide what you want to do,” Reese offered.
Amaryllis blinked at him in dismay. It took her several moments to realize he wasn’t talking about her condition, couldn’t be because he had no knowledge of it. It took her several moments longer to jog her brain into functioning.
“I’m going to stay at the barracks,” she said finally, remembering the announcement that had been made shortly before they’d landed that accommodations for those who had not made other arrangements could be found at the barracks near the edge of town.
Reese and Dante exchanged a look.
“I will be staying at the house of a friend,” Dante said coolly.
Amaryllis must have stared at him a full minute before she realized what he was saying. She glanced at Reese and then at Dante again. He was a medic. But would he have enough knowledge of medicine to know how to check her? Would he know what to look for? He could probably tell her, positively, whether she was or she was not pregnant, but she’d find that out in due time without having to be checked.
What she needed to know was whether the child was normal or if it was defective and, if it was defective, what course she should take.
She shook the thought off, horrified at the desperation that had spawned it. Dante might know her secret, but he might also have fathered the child. She couldn’t let either one of them know.
Reese had spoken of contracting for a family unit. He wouldn’t understand at all.
