Page 200 of Immune

Practical.

Exits.

Not calm down, not breathe, not who are you?

Xeon shifts closer, frost and steel cutting cleanly through the sweetness leaking from me like a broken faucet I can’t turn the fuck off. Quietly, he tells me, “Your feet are on the floor. The table is in front of you. No one is behind you except for us.”

Not pity. Just facts.

Ewan slips his headphones off and holds them out, not touching me. “Want the noise to disappear?”

My eyes drop to them but the room is too loud. Machines humming. Paper sliding. Guards breathing. My pulse. My scent. My father’s name still screaming silently from the file.

I don’t take the headphones, but I also don’t tell him to move them away. He waits, and I hate them a little. All of them. For knowing how to stand close without making me feel caught.

My fingers curl into my palms until my nails bite into the skin with a grounding pain that helps me focus. Then I ask, “What is this?”

The room grows quiet. Too quiet.

Mercer closes the file halfway, like he knows leaving the name exposed is cruel. Then he says, “That’s part of the original NOVAC fertility research archive.”

Fertility. Such a neat, clean little word for bodies turned into battlefields.

“Omega research,” I say bluntly.

“Yes.”

“Say it properly,” I snap.

Mercer’s brows pinch, and I lift my gaze back to his.

“Omega bodies,” I say, voice thin and sharp enough to cut. “Omega pregnancies. Omega heats. Omega survival rates. Omega extinction. Omega everything. Don’t dress it up just because the folder has a fucking label.”

Silence follows, and then Mercer nods. “You’re right.”

That almost knocks me off balance, just because I expected defense. Scientists absolutely love defense. Governments love defense. Men with files love explaining why words are too complicated for the people whose lives were ruined by them.

Mercer only looks tired.

“The archive holds only research on Omega reproductive failure, heat destabilization, pregnancy loss, and the attempted stabilization therapies that became NOVAC,” the doctor then explains.

Became.

Not led to, not contributed to, but became. And my father’s name sits on top of it.

My stomach twists violently, so much so that I almost bend with it.

No.

No, he was trying to help. He... he was trying to save people. Save Mom. Save me. Save all of us. He couldn’t have known. He... he couldn’t have.

Except good intentions often have bodies too. They rot just like everything else.

Hale watches me too closely. “You recognize the name?”

“No,” I say, but the word comes out too quickly. Again.

Someone should seriously take my mouth away from me until it perfects the art of subtlety, because right now it fucking sucks.