Another chapter? Ok. Here you go.
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Knives waited. Unfortunately, she seemed perfectly capable of leaving the conversation on that comment.
"That little habit of yours is annoying," he said after a minute.
"Hmm?"
"That little teasing comment before stopping talking thing. If it so important to you to say something, just come out and say it. Don't hint at it and make me ask."
She blinked. "Sorry. Bad habit. I guess I try not to go on and on about things that are very potentially boring without some encouragement."
"Consider my learning more about what makes you so… unique encouragement enough. I'm tired of prompting you all the time."
She sighed. "Fine. I was the product of a selected breeding effort. My mom really wanted to have my dad's baby. Obsessed over it. Needed to have it. Based her entire life around this need, as a matter of fact. People who could care less about my mother or my father, but incredibly much about their bloodlines, decided to help her.
"The plan was to get my mother drugged to the gills on fertility treatments, and then surprise my father in his bed one night. She went along with the plan whole-heartedly, thinking that if she could have his child, he would love her. I was to be conceived and taken from her womb, cloned, and one of them would have been given back to her.
"My mother might have been a bit on the crazy side, but she wasn't stupid. She knew that she was being used and managed to hide the fact that I was conceived until after it was too late to take me from her womb. So I was born the old-fashioned way and not cloned, after all." She grew silent, searching for words.
Knives took the opportunity to get something clarified. "What exactly is being born the old-fashioned way?"
She looked at him a little oddly. "You know… the way where the woman gets all fat and hormonal."
He blinked. "And the other option is…?"
It was her turn to be a bit taken aback. "You can put people into coldsleep, but haven't developed an artificial womb yet?" She shuddered. "What a barbaric culture."
His eyes narrowed a bit. "Barbaric?"
She shook her head. "Do you have any idea how many birth defects are the result of poor nutrition or ingesting environmental poisons? Fetal alcohol syndrome aside, it is so much better for the child to be nurtured outside the biological mother, where growth needs can be monitored and studied. Leaving a baby in a mother is just… abuse. The earliest form of child abuse possible." She saw the look of incomprehension on his face. "Never mind. Just understand that my mother's decision to keep me was in no way meant that she wanted what was best for me. She just wanted to have total control over my father's child.
"Anyway… after I was born, and my father decided to not even acknowledge me as his, my mother suffered a bit of a nervous breakdown. She lived in her own little fantasy world, one where my father loved his child, and loved her as the mother of it. The physicians didn't break her of it until after it was obvious that she wasn't going to bond with me. Then they brought her back to reality, where she promptly did her best to forget that I even existed. Once she was well, she married my step-father, and my life devolved even further into hell." She lapsed into silence, eyes drifting towards the horizon, but her mind seeing only her memories.
"I fail to see how this made you much of a lab rat," he prompted.
"Oh." She started. "Sorry; got distracted. My father had an ability that no other Genalt ever possessed, the ability to sense an attack the moment before it began. My mother, and her family, possess the ability to sense emotions and the state of a person's soul. The powers that be were enthralled with the potential of a person that could be that tuned in to the people around her."
"You can… sense emotions?" He drew back a bit.
She shot him a dirty look. "I try not to. It's not a very enjoyable experience. Much like trying to eavesdrop on the thoughts of others; it's an invasion of privacy. You're safe; I don't go about trying to feel what people around me are feeling. I try to ignore that part of my abilities as much as possible."
He didn't move back, and she sighed. "Stop treating me like a freak," she asked. "It wasn't my idea to be born. Actually, had I been given the choice, I'd have probably declined. It's been a crappy life, so far."
He shook his head a bit. "Still missing the lab rat part of this."
"Oh. Well, there were tests upon tests upon tests to see just what the pairing had produced. Some of my earliest memories, and a good portion of the ones that aren't, are of hospitals and blood tests and other fun procedures that involve needles and feeling woozy. The end result of all the tests? They managed to determine that I was alive, and not much else. The end test of how good the combination was? I managed to retire from a profession that no one ever retires from. I managed to take a unit where people went to die and turned it into a sought-after posting. And, when I finally decided to enter politics, I did a good enough job making a place for myself that I was taken out by people afraid of what I could accomplish."
"So, in the end I was deemed a successful little experiment. They never did get the results they wanted from me, but no one denied that I was a good little Genalt. Bred for success, then brought up for failure. That's the easiest way to define me." She settled into a depressed silence, and Knives decided it was time to go join Ace up on that rock.