Twisted Metal Heart - Eve Langlais Page 0,35

she lived in, lined with shelves stacked with binders. So many of them because the Earl didn’t fully trust computers to not corrupt their files. With good reason. New Earth didn’t like electronics. Not the kind made by tri-dimensional printers at any rate. The things Riella made always worked.

There were no weapons in sight, not that they would do her much good. Even if she did subdue Mother and Arianne, there were guards just outside. She couldn’t escape out the door and hope to make it far. But she had to do something. She couldn’t live in that room forever. Maybe not even one more day. Soon, her mother’s threat would be realized, and then what?

I have to escape. The last time she faked an accident that made them think she was dead, she’d escaped through the sewers and then into the tunnels. It wouldn’t be as easy this time. Nor would her mother believe she’d died without seeing an entire body.

Riella might have tuned the queen and Earl out, but some words penetrated.

“What did you say?” Riella interrupted.

Earl Arianne paused and looked at her. “You’re pregnant.”

She eyed her belly. “How? You haven’t inseminated me.” Even she knew that required them poking at her vaginally, and yet that was the one thing they hadn’t touched.

“You know how!” her mother spat. “You lied. You did fornicate with that Wastelander rat, and now you’re carrying an undocumented fetus.”

Cold. Which meant Riella knew what would come next.

“You’re going to terminate the pregnancy because that’s what you do to the babies you don’t want,” Riella snapped even as her heart raced. Pregnant with Titan’s child? It never even occurred to her it might happen. Then again, she didn’t take any contraceptives while in the citadel. There was usually no one there to have sex with.

“I still think we should eliminate the waste in your womb, but Arianne has convinced me to wait,” growled the queen.

“A good thing, too, given it turns out the baby is psionic,” the Earl crowed. “We tested it five times to be sure. We have a live one.”

Riella’s blood chilled. “Hold on, you mean you can already tell it’s Deviant?” That explained why her mother was pissed. Even that wicked woman wouldn’t have a power-carrying fetus aborted, not until she decided if she could use it to her benefit or not.

“The child is already showing strong psionic markers.” The Earl waxed on, and Riella wanted to slap her hand on her mouth and tell her to stop. This was only making it worse.

“If she’s having this child, then that means I have to wait nine months before we can attempt a proper genetic match.” Her mother sounded utterly disgruntled. And with reason. There went her plan to breed Riella with an Enclave power of her choice.

“We recommend a year between psionic births. Better results that way.”

Mother growled at the further delay, but Riella saw it as a reprieve—and hope.

She cupped her stomach. Pregnant. With Titan’s child. The father might be dead, but she wasn’t.

Long after she was banished back to her room, she paced. Being with child changed everything. She couldn’t stay here and wait for the right moment to escape. If she was going to leave, she had to do it before she got large with child. She needed to start over somewhere new.

It took her three days to fine-tune her plan and reduce the amount of medication they doped her with. The Earl wasn’t taking chances with Riella, but she knew how to foil them. She reduced her intake of food and flushed her system by drinking water from the tap. On the fourth day, with a metal screw she’d filched on her last walk, she managed to start a fire in her room. Not easily. The exertion left her panting.

The alarms went off at the first sign of smoke, as did the chemical sprinklers. The soldiers who came running had her hustled from the mess into a new room, a space not yet tweaked against her. Then again, the queen and the Earl wrongly thought her subdued because of the pregnancy.

Wrong.

If Wastelander women could be nomads and birth babies, then so could she. She knew how to survive. The only chance this child would have required her escaping.

The soldiers locked the door on the new room and left. The drugs they’d fed her to keep her powers sluggish, while weakened, meant it took more than a little coaxing to convince the metal lock to open.

When it finally