Chapter 1
The rampant rumors about the research had been spreading like famine for years. Isla never seemed to care all that much about them, though. In fact, I had never seen her look up from her notebook for more than a few minutes.
Not that there was much else to look at.
White walls, white ceilings, white floors with the occasional scuff. Of course, the daily, ignorable rumble could be heard from below us, but we'd grown used to that during training.
What we hadn't grown used to was Ace.
He'd only been on the team for a couple of months, and he had to be the most oblivious person I'd ever seen. He never paid attention to the unspoken rules of work:
Don't talk about the rumors.
Don't make noise when you walk.
Don't ever use her name.
But of course, he just had to fucking say it.
"They're starting to figure us out, you know," he said offhandedly, entirely unaware of the glare that Isla was throwing his way, "the public wants to know what happened to Amora Seff."
"Sucks for them," I said passively.
I'm just the accountant, I told myself, I'm not liable for anything shady that they decide to do. I turn a blind eye. It's on them.
"Do you think we'll get into trouble if it does get out?"
"Why would we?" Isla chimed in, "Seff founded the place. We didn't exactly abduct her. She's the reason for her place down there."
"What about the kids?" Ace quirked an eyebrow.
"What about them? Their mother created them. We're just scientists," She shrugged, rolling over to the file cabinet before quietly cursing her broken wheel.
"Want me to push that?" Ace offered.
"No, thank you. I can handle my own wheelchair."
Ace sat back in his chair, separating himself from the plants in front of him. "It's a shame, really. Seff was capable of so much more."
"Speaking of the kids, I'm going to go down and check in on them. It's been a while since there's been any noise."
Abruptly, I stood up and made my way downstairs. I had to feel bad for the kids, Amora had manufactured the oldest of them a little over fourteen years prior, with Isla running the incubators.
I drifted through the long hallway, glancing into dorm rooms to make sure there were no injuries. I'd forget sometimes, honestly, how depressing it was down there. The air hung heavy in the basement, but not as heavy as it did whenever Seff's name was brought up.
Echo was by her door, as usual, watching me pass by. She was the spitting image of Amora Seff: Olive skin, ash brown hair, gunmetal blue eyes that were always fixed on something. The idea that she was made in the incubators was so unfathomable whenever I looked at her. She looked so real, so human.
Well, technically, she was human, but she hadn't been born, just grown.
"What're you looking at?" I asked her.
I wasn't technically supposed to talk to her without being told to, but nobody really cared much for those rules. Even Isla, the ultimate stickler, who never looked up from her notebook, came down to talk to them after work.
"My brother," She replied, hardly glancing at me.
I turned around to face the room across from Echo's. There he was, the youngest of the twenty-eight kids, Cedar. He was barely seven-months-old crawling around on unsteady legs. He looked more like whatever random man in the scientific underground had donated his sperm to the operation this time around, barely resembling Echo or their 'mother' whatsoever.
By the time the fourteenth child had been 'completed', they were their own colony down there, entirely self-sufficient. Maybe that was how they kept themselves entertained, by taking care of each other. Hell, with two of them popping out each year, they had to have some kind of enjoyment.
This had all started when Amora Seff, the founder of Perfection Genetics, had decided that she wanted to create the perfect humans through 'selective breeding'. Her original idea had been to weed out genetic diseases, defects, and disabilities, eventually creating a gene pool that held no genealogical 'errors', as she'd called them.
To accomplish her goal, she'd need a child that had the lowest possible capability of having an 'error', so she started gathering her eggs and finding men to donate their end of the deal, as Ace would say.
Once it was all set in motion, she'd gotten Isla into the picture. Isla was, at the time, a babysitter and engineering student. She was commissioned by Amora Seff to create, with an unbelievably high budget of four billion dollars, to go through the entire conception and pregnancy process done artificially. Where she got the money, she refused to say.
Once her scientist, who had retired and left Ace to fill his position, had found 'errors' in one of the babies, the baby would be sent over to us. Isla continued her mechanical work on perfecting the false womb, Ace continued his genetic research, and I continued working out the funding for all of this. It hadn't been fun to get roped into this, especially since I thought I was getting a normal, everyday office job at first.
Echo wasn't stupid. She knew that I was running numbers for the woman who'd abandoned her for flaws that weren't even visible. She knew that most kids her age had parents and not a massive cluster of younger siblings. But something in her always forgave me whenever I passed by, made her glad to have my presence. Maybe she was just hungry for an adult's affection. Or my affection. I wasn't really sure.
I may have come in early when she was a baby to care for her but...
Oh fuck.
The realization hit me. I'd let Echo get attached. Oh, that wasn't good.
As I looked around, it hurt even more to see these kids--and that's what they were, kids, not experiments--couped up underground, having never seen the sun and forced to take Vitamin D pills just to function.
I had to do something about this, I knew I had to, but the most I could do was comfort them and hope that they'd be set free soon.
Or maybe I could...
No. Getting them out is too dangerous. Seff would have me killed. And Isla would never let me. And where would I even take them all and--
"Ms. Delia? Are you okay?" Echo was staring up at me again.
I shook myself back to reality. "Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry, just thinking."
Looking into those gunmetal blue eyes, I promised myself something.
I may not be able to get all twenty-eight, but let me start with Echo.
And on a whim, I said:
"Hey, Kid, do you want to see the sky?"
