I can stay quiet no longer. "And me?"
"You came in at seven-point-four. The highest marker score the registry has ever produced. We hypothesized your bonds would be strong enough to carry pregnancies where the trace-hybrid mothers couldn't, and we expected you would stabilize whichever operators you bonded with. Both. That was the model. Breed you, observe the stabilization, deploy the bond as a calming presence for the broader operator pool over time."
He looks at me. His face is the face of a man who has decided he is going to live longer if he tells the whole truth.
"You were going to be a mother and a stabilizing agent at the same time, Miss Griggson. That is what File —" he stops. "That is what all of the planning was for."
Fen's shoulder against my calf is vibrating, low and continuous with his growl. Crull's hand finds my shoulder. The bond at my sternum has gone taut with Thaw's attention.
"How sure were you that it would work?"
"We weren't. We had never had a candidate above six-three. You were the first one we could test the model on. The men were the test bed."
"You wanted babies and a leash on the men I bonded to."
"We wanted babies and a calming presence. The men go feral. The program loses operators. We wanted to stop losing them. That is what your bonding ability was supposed to do."
I sit with it.
The Syndicate's plan for me is breeding and stabilization. They wanted me to carry their hybrid pregnancies and quiet down their unstable assets while I did it. The eight-year refinement of the marker panel was about finding a woman whose body could do both jobs. They were running a breeding program with an upside.
I get off the stump.
I walk toward the doctor. Fen comes with me because Fen is on my calf and Fen is not letting go. Crull moves to follow because Crull does not let me get within ten feet of an enemy alone. The wolves and Harek tighten behind me. The whole pack is moving with me.
I stop in front of his chair.
I look down at him.
"What did you call it. In the file. What were you going to deploy me as."
"A bonded stabilizer. A long-term containment asset. The language in the file is technical."
"A leash."
"A presence. They are not the same word, in the language of the program. I am not selling it to you. I am telling you what the file says."
"And if I refused to be deployed."
"You weren't going to refuse. You were going to be brought in over a course of months, paired with the men under controlledexposure, bonded under conditions the program controlled. Your refusal was not a variable the planning accounted for."
"And what I just did to Fen in the trees twenty minutes ago. What is the language for that."
He looks at me.
For one second he does not have a word. He is a desk researcher with a model and the model does not contain the thing I just did. I watch his face try to fit what he is looking at into the categories he came in with, and the categories do not hold.
"I don't —" he says. "I don't have language for that. We did not project that as a possibility."
"You did not project that as a possibility."
"No."
"What would the file have called it. If it had happened in your lab."
He swallows.
"In the program's language? I don't know. The closest word the models reach for —"
