Sleeping Dogs Lie

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I actually don't spend too much time thinking about Lance and his message. There's not much I can do about it right now anyways, so it doesn't seem worth spending any effort on. In fact, I try to put all of my troubles with Aaron out of my head altogether.

That makes it so much easier to drop Freya off with Gemma in the evening before I don't go over to visit him. And easier to deal with Gemma's knowing stink-eye, too. She knows I'm up to something. I don't know how she can tell or what she thinks she knows, but she spends plenty of time shoving me around and breathing loudly through her nose while she makes disapproving sounds in the back of her throat.

So I don't spend too much time with Gemma, either.

I don't need all of these things ganging up on me, reminding me that I am currently backstabbing the one person in this God-forsaken hole who might actually be on my side. Even if he is lying to me. Maybe he is lying to me out of the purest motives, because he thinks I'm some delicate little flower he needs to protect. My motives are not so pure. I'm lying to him because he's lying to me. And because that is my building, damn it!

My trip over to the other building goes stunningly smoothly. I've timed it around guard patrols, and am getting very good and careful at listening for ambient sounds at locked doors. Before I know it, I'm checked into that extra clean, empty building, and am browsing around on Aaron's grandfather's computer in the dark.

It's this Ouranos place that I'm really interested in, and all the people there who supposedly belonged to me.

Once I'm in the system, the files on that place aren't hard to find. They are massive, and what's contained in them chills me to the bone.

What Aaron told me about that place before doesn't cover the half of what it seems like was going on over there. To say they were manufacturing genetically modified soldiers makes it seem simplistic. They had a fully instituted and carefully monitored breeding program. None of the soldiers who were born there were an accident. They were manufactured in test tubes and implanted into women who essentially acted as nothing more than broodmares for the program. I know that neither my mother nor my father were born on the road. This means that they were raised in this program, as commodities rather than as human beings. I think the man who I'd always thought of as my grandfather – my father's father – took them away from Ouranos when they were teenagers. I think he took a whole group of them, those soldiers, and scientists, too. How is it that only two survived the Freeze? Now I'm thinking that man – the grandfather – was probably not related to us at all. He was probably just some other soldier that my parents thought of as a parental figure or mentor. I suppose I'll never know my parents' whole story.

And they were supposed to be sterile, too, those soldiers. So what does it mean that my parents were able to have not just one, but two children? Where did we come from? And Sander... Did he come from that place, too? Is he one of those soldiers? Now I have to wonder about Sander...

I'm so absorbed in these Ouranos files that I almost don't hear the quiet sounds of the door unlatching downstairs and footsteps on the stairwell. It's the voices that finally rip me out of my reverie. Aaron's voice.

He's coming here. How can he be coming here? He's not supposed to be within three wings of this place tonight! And now here I am trapped at the back of this building.

I leap up out of the captain's chair at the desk, which thankfully shuts down the system there more effectively than I could ever do manually. There's nowhere else for me to go in here where I can hide. I could hide under the desk, but if he comes in here and sits down, I'll be the first thing he kicks around with his lying, tool feet.