Sanaa didn’t deny it. I hadn’t thought she would. “He was working on getting you out. Both of you.” Her low, careful pitch made this place seem like a tomb all of a sudden. Things were buried here, things like love and hope.
Sanaa moved into the bedroom but only barely. “He was putting the finishing touches on this place when your mother passed away. He went back to get you and found her dead.”
My heart withered and died a little in my chest. So close? A matter of days, and we might have had all this?
My chin quivered. Why didn’t he take me anyway? Without Mom, I wasn’t enough?
I swiped a tear from my cheek. “Murdered, you mean.”
“Yes. Murdered.” Sanaa’s voice hardened. True rage stormed into her expression like a desert wind. Harsh. Dry. Ready to flay skin off in strips. “I know what happened. The deadly virus. How the Overseer held the cure over her head.”
“She wouldn’t tell him who my real father was, so he let her die, just like he said he would. Probably the only person he ever loved, and he killed her,” I spat out in disgust.
“There are small blessings, Daraja. At least you haven’t lived nearly two decades knowing you could have saved her with just a few drops of your blood.”
Sanaa’s dark eyes held mine, and my whole world tipped over. Bridgebane was the source of my A1 blood.
I reached out and picked up the picture of my father and me on the bedside table. My father and me. Mom’s stepbrother. The man who’d gone with her into hell. When had they fallen in love? As teenagers, after their parents’ marriage brought them together, these two people who might never have met? Or was it later, when my mother needed the touch of a man who didn’t make her skin crawl?
Nathaniel Bridgebane was a little older than Caitrin Bishop. She’d followed him into all sorts of rebel trouble when they were young, but he’d followed her into something much more destructive, hadn’t he? And then…I’d come along.
I stared at the picture. How had no one guessed, even me? Tall, dark hair, blue eyes. I looked just like him. Was the Overseer that blind? Caitrin and Nate—they were the two he just couldn’t see past, weren’t they? Because they meant something to him.
It was hard to understand the Overseer’s obsession with my mother. He’d seen her and put her on a weird sort of pedestal that I don’t think she’d understood, either, but knew she could use. Their marriage stopped the attacks on the Outer Zones and ended the final Sambian War. She agreed to be his and got him to back off on the bombings and accept negotiations. Like a pawn, she sacrificed herself for the good of the game. The stability it brought consolidated Novalight’s power, yes, but it also brought an end to decades of fighting and murder on a mass scale. Caitrin did that. That was her legacy. It wasn’t the Overseer who brought peace to the galaxy; it was my mother.
Whatever the Overseer thought love was made no sense to me, but he desired in ways that warped his mind. He desired control, power, Caitrin Bishop. But Mom had wielded her own power, even though it was hard to see sometimes, especially from the outside. He only got her on her terms, and he’d never been able to control her, not even when death was the alternative.
My parents never gave in to him. They both walked that bridge. I closed my eyes and saw them together. They were a perfect fit.
I opened my eyes to the picture in the frame again. Me on my father’s lap. I set it down before I threw it across the room and ruined the herd of unicorns stenciled on the wall. “How dare he? How dare he let me be poked and prodded and drained when he had the same blood!”
“Listen to me carefully.” Sanaa took a step closer, her voice snapping with anger at me now. “First of all, your father couldn’t have done anything for anyone if the Overseer had locked him up the way he locked up you and your mother. Second, do you want to know why I’m a better super soldier than Merrick? Why I don’t have the bulk and can blend in? Why I can beat ten Merricks in a fight and not even break a sweat?”
“Yeah.” I popped off the bed and stood eye to eye with Sanaa, scowling at her tone and at everything else. “I do want to know that.”
“Because it was the general’s blood in my formula. Pure Mornavail. You’re a half breed, darling, and the Overseer’s enhanced army is based on you, not him.”
Holy shit. I choked on the acid burn in the back of my mouth. “Does the Overseer know about you?”
She shook her head. “That’s a well-kept secret around him. How would we explain the differences? And like I said before, he reboots you otherwise. Reprograms a person to be his.”
Were Sanaa and Merrick the only ones who’d escaped the final injection? There would be rebel super soldiers now, too. But the Overseer was searching for more A1 blood as we spoke. There had to be others like Bridgebane—pure Mornavail.
“And the GIN Project?” I asked. “The early test subjects?”
Sanaa spread her hands. “He’ll find more pure blood. He already did in that lot we pulled off the Ewelock DWALSH.”
“Has he had time to use it? Make more enhancers?” I panicked. I might have given the rebellion super soldiers, but the Overseer would have Sanaa Mwendes. That wasn’t a fair fight.
“We don’t think so. We didn’t know about the GIN Project or the early testing. The Overseer did that all by himself. He’s still analyzing, as far as your father can tell. Figuring out the variations in the blood samples and seeing how the differences interact with his formula. They weren’t all pures. Most of them weren’t. And now, he’s lost his supply again.”
Well, thank the Powers for that. Turning to pace, I scraped my hands through my hair and pulled it back. “The wider GIN Project is still coming. We have to stop it.”
“One thing at a time. Let’s worry about Starbase 12 next.” Sanaa held up the bag in her hand.
Curiosity about what my father—shit, even thinking that was weird—had left us warred with pulse-spiking anxiety over the GIN Project. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was my fault.
The expensive hardwood floor creaked under my feet, like new and unused things did. “The early testing started right after I stole the lab, didn’t it? I took the Overseer’s whole stash of enhancers, and he realized he’d fucked himself by ‘killing’ me when I was eight.”
“Something like that.”
I stabbed a prickly look at Sanaa as I stalked past. “You mean exactly like that.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Daraja. The Overseer is the one dragging people off to laboratory prisons.”
I expelled a bitter huff. It felt a little like flying apart at the seams—except everything was finally knitting together. “The lab or me. That was what Bridgebane said on Starway 8. He didn’t get either, so he threatened the orphanage and forced the blood exchange on me instead. He knew he had to scramble to appease that monster with something, anything, before the Overseer set something terrible into motion to look for more A1 blood.”