The Black Tide (Outcast 3)

“Yes.”

“And how long have you been here, doing this?”

“Me? A couple of years.”

“And this site overall?”

“Ten years, at least.”

“Does that mean the lizard men who guard this place are a result of your testing?”

“Yes.” She licked her lips again. “It was one of our more successful development streams—just over fifty percent of the test subjects lived.”

“Because you were using DNA from this world?”

“Yes. But those men were all volunteers, and well paid.”

I couldn’t imagine there’d be any amount of money that would ever make up for what had happened to their bodies. But then, as Nuri had noted, it wasn’t like I was at all familiar with what it was truly like to live as one of the poor in a city such as Central.

“What was the end aim of that program?”

“To create supersoldiers,” she said. “To create beings capable of battling the Others.”

I snorted. Given Sal had told me their end game was to completely erase the stain of humanity from this place, I doubted they’d actually be creating a fighting force capable of matching blows with the Others. It was more likely they were aiming for a force capable of going where the Others could not.

“And the wraith pathogen? How long have you been testing that?” I asked. “And why aren’t you testing it on adult volunteers rather than babies?”

“That particular pathogen has been in development for close to a year, and we did initially start with adults. All the test subjects died within hours of administration. We started using children after similar explorations in other labs—but with different drugs—proved they were better test subjects.”

My fingers tightened, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to force them apart. Nothing. Her face mottled and her breathing became shuddering, shallow gasps, but I felt no sympathy for her. “Other labs?”

“In Central,” she somehow said. “And in Longborne.”

I had no idea where Longborne was, but the lab in Central was undoubtedly the now defunct Winter Halo. “How long have the children in this lab been here?”

“The ones in the restraining cots have been here the longest, the little girl at the end the shortest. She’s only received two shots so far.” The woman paused, her breath wheezing in and out of her lungs. I still couldn’t ease my grip on her. I was barely resisting the urge to do the opposite. “Look, I only work here. I was just doing what I was told—”

“You were torturing goddamn children. You’re trying to create a pathogen to allow wraiths full light immunity.”

Her eyes widened further, and I hadn’t thought that was possible. “No, I swear, we’re trying to find a means to kill them!”

“By first turning human and shifter babies into wraiths? There’s only one world in which something like that would be acceptable, and it’s certainly not this one.”

“You have to believe me—”

I didn’t. Not one iota. There might be fear in her, but there was no guilt or doubt, and surely there should have been at least a fraction of either. How could anyone truly believe that testing alien-based pathogens on humans and shifters would lead to a means of killing wraiths? If that was truly their aim, why wouldn’t they be testing any drug developed on wraiths? Granted, they were very deadly and extremely hard to capture alive, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. The DNA they were using in their pathogens had to come from somewhere, after all. For all I knew, there were government approved lab facilities that had the Others in captivity, and that were currently researching various means of destroying them.

But this lab was not one of them.

Not given it was a false rift that had led me here.

“Is this lab the only one containing live subjects?”

She nodded. “We did have two other production labs in operation here, but babies have been hard to come by of late.”

Before I could reply or respond in any way, the door into the lab from the antechamber opened and another scientist walked through. “Betts, I need you to—”