Dean says, quiet, "It worked."
"It worked."
"Yes. Every one of them. Thaw, Crull and Harek have shown remarkable improvement according the the file. Fen broke a chair this morning instead of breaking you."
"Fuck them."
It comes out flat.
"Fuck them, Dean. They weren't trying to save Thaw. They were trying to save an investment. They wrotetermination pending pairing trialon his file like he was a piece of equipment and they ran the numbers on whether they could get one more cycle out of him before they put him down. They were not rescuing him. They were preserving inventory."
Dean does not say anything.
He nods once. Slowly.
"How long have they been running it."
"Five years on the combined program. The first round was six pairings, maybe seven. All of the early ones failed. The females did not survive. The operators did not stabilize. The program was almost shut down."
"Almost shut down, what changed?"
"They refined the registry. Pulled tighter. Higher scores."
He looks at me.
"You are at seven-point-four. The highest the registry has ever scored."
"What does that mean?"
"Seven-point-four isn't a capability score."
"Then what is it?"
"Prediction." Dean taps the page. "Their best guess. They were going to find out by putting you in a corridor with four feral monsters."
I sit down.
Not because I decided to. Because my legs decided.
The bonds in my chest are full. Thaw has crossed the kitchen and his hand is at the back of my neck now, broad and grounding. Harek is at Thaw's shoulder.
"They wanted me to stabilize four men they were about to put down. And carry their children."
"Yes."
Daron speaks from the table. He has not raised his voice. He has not needed to.
"From their perspective, it was a clean deal. If the male stabilizes, they keep the operator. If a child comes out of the pairing, they get a new operator. They double their investment. The female is the input. The operator and the child are the outputs."
"The input."
"Their word."
"Yeah. I figured."
I look at the files. I look at the photograph of Thaw on the top of the stack.
"Are the bonds real?"
