Covenant (boyxboy)

Chapter Five

I had to feign ignorance the night Connor presented me with Grace's fertility panel reports.

"What are these?"

"Uh... homework. For Reproductive Health." He scratched the side of his nose with a fingertip.

"I thought you weren't allowed in that class," I said, watching his hand with some amusement.

"I'm not. But Maddy has to write a report and I said I'd help." Another nose scratch. He had one of the classic human tells for lying: his face got itchy. I'd noticed it a couple times when he was young, but witnessing it up close and in person was pretty cute. Especially since he didn't realize he was doing it.

I flipped through the stack of papers he'd handed me and did my best to look thoughtful. "What kind of report is it?"

"Oh. Uh... an analysis, I guess?"

I nodded and paged through some more. Grace was clever. She had redacted the documents as thoroughly as any report of Connor's that we'd sent up the chain at EBG. And she'd sent them in hard copy, so there was no digital trail. "Not sure there's much to analyze," I said. "These are grim numbers."

"Well, Maddy doesn't want to write her paper the same way as everyone else. She wants to argue that this girl can be helped."

"Progesterone's low, FSH and LH are out of balance, and her N-factor barely registers on the charts. The right doses of Leuprolide might even out the hormones, but..."

"Leuproline?"

"-prolide," I corrected. He had pulled out his school tablet and was trying to write the term down, so I said it again. "Leuprolide. It overstimulates certain hormones and suppresses others."

Connor nodded, typing furiously.

"But a patient would have to take blood tests a few days into a new cycle, so that the dosages could be worked out. This girl," I tapped the papers, "has cycles that are all over the place. A couple do approach decent numbers, but most are way off. The variations are fine for a human pregnancy, but a Nephilim embryo is unlikely to implant... and even if one did, it wouldn't survive long enough to become self-sustaining. And then there's the matter of her N-factor. Her tolerance for Nephilim DNA is very low. She'd be in for a difficult pregnancy."

Just like Ji-Soo. I knew Connor wanted to help Grace, but in all likelihood a Nephilim pregnancy would be as deadly to her as to her mother. She'd be better off forgetting about becoming a Bride, and marrying a human. It's not like there weren't plenty of downsides to being a Bride, anyway.

I was about to say so when Connor turned pleading blue eyes on me. "There's got to be something that can make an N-factor better. You guys alter DNA in the womb to make Elioud! This would just be like... an enhancement to what's already there."

"It's complicated," I responded. The Bride treatment only worked because it involved prenatal development.

"Why? I read that Nephilim were using CRISPR in the Middle Ages, right? And now humans are using it for all kinds of gene therapy. There's even biohackers running experiments on themselves."

Hence why my people had held off sharing the technology for a few thousand years. Some people had more curiosity than sense.

"Can't you snip out the weak DNA and insert better sequences?"

"We have to be able to label them accurately first." That was the biggest issue with undoing what had been done to him. "If cuts aren't made in the right places, we could turn on a cancer gene by accident... or worse. CRISPR, ZFNs, they work with human DNA, which is relatively clean. Nephilim genetics are messy." And uncooperative. None of our tools could distinguish between the two Nephilim bases, so there was no way to accurately target them.