"What am I looking at?" I ask.
"The breeding program's outcomes," Dean says. "Forty years of attempts. Each row is a pairing. Each pairing is a registry woman matched with a donor."
I read down the table.
The outcome column repeats the same words in different combinations.Maternal mortality. Embryonic failure. Mid-term termination. No viable issue.Page after page of it.
I look for the line that says anything else.
Six lines. In forty years. Six.
The outcome column on those six lines sayslive birth.
Beside live birth, another column.Offspring outcome.
Failed to thrive, terminated month 4. Failed to thrive, terminated month 7. Behavioral instability, terminated year 3. Behavioral instability, terminated year 5. Retained, deployed. Retained, deployed.
"Until five years ago these were separate programs. The operators started going feral. The breeding program had been failing for forty years. Somebody put them together. We know this part."
I look at the page again.
“So why am I looking at all of this again Dean?”
Dean glances at the rearview. He's quiet for a long second.
"The Syndicate's panel screens for atypical biology in routine bloodwork," he says. "Hemoglobin that doesn't match a fully human reference range. Hormonal patterns that read off. A specific marker they identified about thirty years ago that correlates with hybrid bloodlines. Plus high fertility indicators on the standard reproductive panel."
"Mine."
"Yours came back positive on every category they screen for. The composite score is the seven-point-four. Highest the registry has ever produced in forty years of looking."
"Higher than any of the mothers in this folder."
"Every one of them was trace-hybrid. Bloodline too far back to register on a standard panel. The Syndicate caught them because the panel was sensitive enough to find faint signal. They tried to breed full hybrids out of trace-hybrid mothers and the mothers died, or the children died, because the bodies couldn't carry."
"And the theory was."
"Find a mother whose body wasn't trace-hybrid. Find a mother whose body was already most of the way to hybrid. See if her body could carry what no trace-hybrid mother could."
"They've been refining the panel for forty years."
"Looking for stronger hybrid signal."
"Looking for me."
"Looking for someone like you."
I close my eyes.
I have been remarkably healthy my whole life. I have never been sick. I have a pain tolerance that is very high. I have never broken a bone. I have always been able to read animals in a way other animal control officers could not — the dogs going quiet around me, the feral cats not running. I have always known when somebody in a room was lying. I have always known when somebody was about to be violent. I thought it was instinct. I thought it was experience. I thought I had a good gut.
I have a hybrid body. I have had a hybrid body for thirty-one years. The patch on my chest is not the start of something. It is something inside me that has been there my whole life and has finally pushed up to the surface where I could see it. The Syndicate's panel reader recognized what was in my blood from a vial of it in February.
I open my eyes. "Dean," I say.
"Yes."
"The two surviving adults."
