BDP32
I was having trouble sleeping. Ever since Weis had given me the heads up, I've been living a lie. The guilt alone would be enough to keep me from sleeping; the jealousy and fear were just frosting on the cake. I was worried about the Dragons and I was worried about myself.
Weis had been right about Casca. He was waiting for me to screw up. I could feel him watching me. I was becoming as twitchy as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, running purely on caffeine and adrenaline. The stress and lack of sleep were bound to catch up with me. I would start to make the mistakes he was watching for, simply out of sheer exhaustion.
Today had been the worst. After two nights of no sleep and every effort at private communication foiled, there had been another staff meeting. Casca had watched me like a hawk the entire time. Since I was already irritable from the amount of caffeine I had consumed, his unwavering attention had made me combative.
I sniped at him continually, earning looks of bafflement and fear from most of the staff. No one challenged Casca, or openly disagreed with him about anything these days. It wasn't healthy. I didn't care. I took every opportunity to verbally undercut him, ignoring the promised violence in his voice and body language.
I'm sure everyone thinks I am morally outraged over the things we're doing, and that the prostitutes were the last straw. After all, I'm Irish Catholic. Pretty to think it was morals, but my reasons are not so pure as that. Oh, on one level I'm not happy with bringing in hookers simply because it is a profession demeaning to women, but it just isn't that simple.
His little smirk when they handed out the dossiers on the prostitutes pushed my blood pressure through the roof. The fact that they had dossiers should have warned me what I would see when I opened the files, but it didn't. I thumbed through the pages with growing suspicion.
These were not ordinary prostitutes. The local hookers and bar girls had never looked anything like this, nor did they have this kind of I.Q. rating. Or been tested for one, I'm sure. They had all signed a waiver regarding pregnancies too. I didn't need to read all the fine print to know what was going on. Someone wasn't content with training and modifying adults, they wanted to breed super soldiers from the ground up.
The rest of the staff sat there, stunned by the sheer audacity of what lay before them. One thing leapt out of the small print at me, any fetal material became the sole property of Vorshlag Industries.
I wanted to scream. Of course they signed their rights away. If they weren't Vorshlag employees, Vorshlag's people had recruited them, and they were almost certainly getting some kind of incentive if they turned up pregnant.
The women already had designated partners on their dossier. How much more obvious could Casca make the fact that he had intended this all along? Trying to distract myself from the vein pounding in my temple, I went through the files, checking to see who had been paired with whom.
There had not been anyone assigned to Nottingham. That couldn't be right? I looked through again and found nothing. I counted the women and found there were only ten of them, instead of eleven. Of course I had to say something sarcastic about Casca's inability to count.
He rather calmly informed me that Nottingham had refused to participate, which struck me as odd. Casca should have been furious at being balked, especially as long as it looked like he'd been setting this up.
A sudden and horrible suspicion filled me. Did he know about Ian and myself? Was that why he was so calm? Had he intended me to be number eleven all along, or was he taking advantage of the situation he had found?
I turned my pillow over and punched it several times in frustration. Thoughts like that were not conducive to sleep. Of course he didn't know about Ian and myself, that was just lack of sleep and paranoia talking. I needed to calm down and get some rest, or I'd be even more worthless tomorrow.
The ceiling had thirty-seven tiles, I knew that from the last two nights, but I counted them again anyway. I kept recounting, hoping to lull my brain to sleep. As tired as I was, it might have even worked, but the creaking of a loose floorboard in the living room jerked me back to full alert.
There was a sealed vial of hydrochloric acid on my bedside table, and ether under the sink in the bathroom. Chlorine gas waited in a kitchen cupboard. I had started to bring chemicals home from the lab that weren't on the proscribed list, just in case. I palmed the acid and pretended to be sleeping. Whoever came through the door was going to get a nasty surprise.
I was having trouble sleeping. Ever since Weis had given me the heads up, I've been living a lie. The guilt alone would be enough to keep me from sleeping; the jealousy and fear were just frosting on the cake. I was worried about the Dragons and I was worried about myself.
Weis had been right about Casca. He was waiting for me to screw up. I could feel him watching me. I was becoming as twitchy as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, running purely on caffeine and adrenaline. The stress and lack of sleep were bound to catch up with me. I would start to make the mistakes he was watching for, simply out of sheer exhaustion.
Today had been the worst. After two nights of no sleep and every effort at private communication foiled, there had been another staff meeting. Casca had watched me like a hawk the entire time. Since I was already irritable from the amount of caffeine I had consumed, his unwavering attention had made me combative.
I sniped at him continually, earning looks of bafflement and fear from most of the staff. No one challenged Casca, or openly disagreed with him about anything these days. It wasn't healthy. I didn't care. I took every opportunity to verbally undercut him, ignoring the promised violence in his voice and body language.
I'm sure everyone thinks I am morally outraged over the things we're doing, and that the prostitutes were the last straw. After all, I'm Irish Catholic. Pretty to think it was morals, but my reasons are not so pure as that. Oh, on one level I'm not happy with bringing in hookers simply because it is a profession demeaning to women, but it just isn't that simple.
His little smirk when they handed out the dossiers on the prostitutes pushed my blood pressure through the roof. The fact that they had dossiers should have warned me what I would see when I opened the files, but it didn't. I thumbed through the pages with growing suspicion.
These were not ordinary prostitutes. The local hookers and bar girls had never looked anything like this, nor did they have this kind of I.Q. rating. Or been tested for one, I'm sure. They had all signed a waiver regarding pregnancies too. I didn't need to read all the fine print to know what was going on. Someone wasn't content with training and modifying adults, they wanted to breed super soldiers from the ground up.
The rest of the staff sat there, stunned by the sheer audacity of what lay before them. One thing leapt out of the small print at me, any fetal material became the sole property of Vorshlag Industries.
I wanted to scream. Of course they signed their rights away. If they weren't Vorshlag employees, Vorshlag's people had recruited them, and they were almost certainly getting some kind of incentive if they turned up pregnant.
The women already had designated partners on their dossier. How much more obvious could Casca make the fact that he had intended this all along? Trying to distract myself from the vein pounding in my temple, I went through the files, checking to see who had been paired with whom.
There had not been anyone assigned to Nottingham. That couldn't be right? I looked through again and found nothing. I counted the women and found there were only ten of them, instead of eleven. Of course I had to say something sarcastic about Casca's inability to count.
He rather calmly informed me that Nottingham had refused to participate, which struck me as odd. Casca should have been furious at being balked, especially as long as it looked like he'd been setting this up.
A sudden and horrible suspicion filled me. Did he know about Ian and myself? Was that why he was so calm? Had he intended me to be number eleven all along, or was he taking advantage of the situation he had found?
I turned my pillow over and punched it several times in frustration. Thoughts like that were not conducive to sleep. Of course he didn't know about Ian and myself, that was just lack of sleep and paranoia talking. I needed to calm down and get some rest, or I'd be even more worthless tomorrow.
The ceiling had thirty-seven tiles, I knew that from the last two nights, but I counted them again anyway. I kept recounting, hoping to lull my brain to sleep. As tired as I was, it might have even worked, but the creaking of a loose floorboard in the living room jerked me back to full alert.
There was a sealed vial of hydrochloric acid on my bedside table, and ether under the sink in the bathroom. Chlorine gas waited in a kitchen cupboard. I had started to bring chemicals home from the lab that weren't on the proscribed list, just in case. I palmed the acid and pretended to be sleeping. Whoever came through the door was going to get a nasty surprise.