Thorne raised his dart pistol. Vess didn’t flinch. She simply raised her mismatched arm, and from her palm extended a bone-spur slick with black venom.
Thorne looked out at the rain-slicked ruins of the old world, then at the girl who was never cargo, never bait, never a donor. She was a ghost in the machine. And he was tired of being a monster. breedbus
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. Thorne raised his dart pistol