But she didn’t stab Vess.
Vess smiled with four different lips. “The cartel wants to restart the human race. Boring. I want to evolve it. My Amalgams can survive the Ghoul. They can breathe the clouds. They can birth themselves. I just need one more clean donor to perfect the matrix.” Her yellow eye fixed on Kaelen. “Her.” breedbus
She was a Breeder legend, a ghost story. Vess had been the lead geneticist on the original sterilization project. When it failed, she didn't seek a cure. She sought a workaround . If people couldn’t make babies the old way, she’d make them in vats. If the vats failed, she’d stitch viable tissue together into walking, breathing incubators. She called them Amalgams . The cartel called them her daughters. Everyone else called them monsters. But she didn’t stab Vess
“It did,” the woman said, stepping into the bus. “And I improved it.” Boring
He pressed a syringe into her palm. “Or you could use this. On me. Right now.”
Vess’s body began to convulse. Stitches tore. Her long arm detached at the shoulder and twitched on the floor. The four voices inside her screamed in four different keys, then fell silent. She collapsed, a heap of beautiful, terrible failure.
The Breedbus was the underworld’s answer to the sterilization clouds that had drifted across the old world ten years ago. A bio-weapon, mistimed and misapplied, had rendered 98% of humanity infertile. Children became myth. Governments collapsed into clinics. And from the wreckage rose the Breeders —a black market cartel that didn't trade in drugs or guns, but in viable ova, viable sperm, and the wombs to host them.