Elentinus.”
“How dare you refer to him with such familiarity! He’s Lord Elentinus! Lord Elentinus!”
I cringed back. Damn it—I knew that. “Sorry. I—I forgot. Lord Elentinus. Then husband. I won’t forget again.”
Whore glared at me, but his tone showed me I’d appeased him. “Anyway, my people are on the brink of extinction. Even worse than your own. It’s imperative that you start the breeding cycle as soon as possible.”
An icy shudder started at the back of my neck and moved all the way to my stomach. As we exited the elevator I was hugging myself again. (I’d stopped doing that for at least a little while).
“What…what’s the breeding cycle?”
“Kindly spare me your tiresome foreboding. You’ll be given injections to increase your fertility. Lord Elentinus will impregnate you twice per month.”
My jaw dropped.
“Five days after every conception the zygotes will be removed from your body to be gestated artificially.”
This brought my horror level down a few ticks. At least they weren’t planning to turn me into a brood queen. Now I just had to deal with the thought of—what? Twenty-four babies a year?
“What happens to the babies?”
Whore stuck his nose in the air. “They’re cherished of course. They’ll be granted to worthy caretakers who will raise them with the utmost love and care.”
“…Really?”
Whore spun on me. “Yes. Really.”
I took a deep cathartic breath. I figured I could live with that. I had to. If everything they’d been saying was true, if they really didn’t have many women left, and if they were really on the brink of extinction, then I had to expect to be used this way. If I let myself get sentimental about my children then I’d probably lose it.
“I’m going to be having surgery twice a month?”
Whore gave me a dismissive wave. “Pah, it’s nothing. You won’t even notice anything’s been done to you. The unit is quick and precise. It will be a minor inconvenience at worst.”
A robot surgeon? Well, it was probably better than having Whore cut me open.
We’d crossed the lobby and were now headed down another long corridor. This one had several doors lining the sides. Whore brought me to one of the larger ones. I recognized the room inside as a clinic. A pretty sleek one, full of a lot of rounded fixtures coming out of the walls and floors.
Whore walked over to a counter with some equipment on it. “When was your last menstrual cycle?”
Oh, boy. I hadn’t been sexually active since a brief indiscretion in college, so I had no reason to keep track of them. I blinked a few times. I remembered bleeding through my pad on the plane ride to New York . “Uh, like, two weeks ago.”
Whore grumbled. “Of course. You’re probably fertile right now. Come here. Give me your finger.”
I gave him the middle one. (Heh, heh). He put it under the blue light of a scanner thing. A black rectangle the size of a big screen TV appeared on the wall in front of us. After a few seconds my body in the form of a laser grid appeared on the screen. Apparently the blue light shooting into my finger was spreading all through me.
“They already found a cure for cancer, right?”
Whore shushed me. The mapping got more elaborate, with veins and organs being displayed. Whore tapped his fingers on a control panel and it zeroed in on my reproductive system. A red blinking triangle pointed towards something. Whore made the area larger.
“You’re ovulating.”
I eyed him.
He made several annoyed sounds and headed toward the door. “Wait here.”
He left me alone several minutes. I used the time to analyze myself on the screen. From what I could tell there were no giant tumors anywhere. Yay?
Whore returned with a black rectangular thing with a point on it and something