It took Corinne a long while before she responded. "Every child deserves to have someone willing to do whatever it takes to keep them safe, to ensure their happiness. That's what family is supposed to be, isn't it?" When she looked at him now, her expression seemed troubled, haunted somehow. "Don't you think that's true, Hunter?"
"I would not know." He slowed in front of a dark little shotgun house with boarded windows and a sagging front porch. It looked abandoned, as did the rest of the meager homes that still stood after the waters had receded years earlier. Cracked, weed-choked cement foundations marked the places where other houses had been. "This one should suffice," he told Corinne as he put the vehicle in park.
She was still staring at him oddly from across the wide bench seat of the El Camino. "You never had anyone at all - not even when you were a child? Not even your mother?"
He killed the engine and took out the key. "There was no one. I was taken away from the Breedmate who bore me in Dragos's laboratory when I was still an infant. I have no memory of her. The Minion handler assigned to me by Dragos was responsible for my rearing. Such as it was."
Her face had gone pale and slack. "You were born in the lab? You were ... taken away from your mother?"
"We all were," he replied. "Dragos engineered our lives from the instant we were conceived. He controlled everything, to ensure we became his perfect killing machines loyal only to him. We were born to be his assassins. His Hunters, and nothing more."
"Hunters." The word sounded wooden on her tongue. "I thought Hunter was your name. Is it your name?"
He could see her confusion. Her frown furrowed deeper as she quietly processed all that she was hearing. "Hunter is the only thing I've been called from the day I was born. It is what I am. What I will always be."
"Oh, my God." Her soft exhalation trembled a bit. Something else flickered across her face in that moment, something he could not place. It looked like sorrow. It looked like fresh, dawning horror. "All the infants born in Dragos's labs were taken away. They've all been raised like you were? All those innocent baby boys. That's what became of them all ..."
It wasn't asked as a question, but he answered her with a frank, solemn nod. Corinne closed her eyes, saying nothing more. She turned her head away from him, toward the dark glass of the passenger window.
In the suddenly awkward and lengthening silence, Hunter reached down and opened the driver-side door. "Wait here. I'll go check the house and make sure it's suitable shelter."
She didn't answer. She didn't even look at him, her face now tucked into her right shoulder. As he walked away, he thought he noticed tears sliding down her cheek. Corinne all but vaulted out of the vehicle as soon as Hunter had gone into the house. The prolonged drive in the confining space would have been enough to spike her anxiety, all the more so considering what she'd witnessed at the airport tonight. But it was something far worse that sent her fleeing the car for the dank, predawn outdoors.
Fear and horror gripped her, threatening to turn her stomach inside out as she stumbled toward a concrete slab in the derelict yard next door. She sank down onto the damp foundation and buried her face in her hands.
In all of her many nightmares over what might have become of her son, never had she imagined the brutal fate Hunter had just described to her.
Hunter.
Good lord, it wasn't even a true name. Just a label for an object, no different from one that might be used to refer to a blade or a pistol, or any other tool manufactured for the sole purpose of destruction.
Insignificant.
Expendable.
Inhuman.
She wiped at the tears that had begun falling even before Hunter had left the vehicle. Her heart ached for his past suffering, but it tore apart in her breast at the realization that her baby boy - the beautiful, innocent child she'd loved instantly on sight - was still trapped inside the ugly world of Dragos's making.
A sob rose in her throat as she remembered the sweet face of the squalling infant she'd delivered some thirteen years ago. She could still picture his tiny fists flailing as the Minion nurse carried him across the labor room to wash him and wrap him in a plain white blanket. She could still see his eyes - almond shaped and bluish green, like her own, his dermaglyph- covered scalp crowned with a smattering of silky black hair, the same color as hers. Her son would have her sonokinetic ability too, inherited genetically from her the same way he would inherit his Gen One strength and power from the creature who'd sired him. The talent Corinne gave her son was something Dragos could never take away from him. That ability would forever stamp him as hers, no matter what Dragos had done to him in the years he'd had to bend him to his twisted missions and ideals.
Her son had a name as well. Corinne had whispered it to him in that first moment their eyes had met and locked in the delivery room. He'd heard her, even at a scant few minutes out of her womb, she was sure of it. And he'd heard her cry for him as the Minion nurse carried him away an instant later, never to be seen again.
God, how many days and weeks and months - how many years - had she mourned his absence from her life? And now, to think what he'd been born into. It made her sick with anguish to imagine what he might have become in the thirteen years Dragos had controlled him. Hope churned desperately within her. Maybe he wasn't living that awful existence, after all. Maybe he'd been taken away from her for some other purpose, not shackled to Dragos's whims by a deadly ultraviolet collar. Not forced to exist as a killing machine without knowing who he truly was, without anyone to hold him or nurture him or love him. And if he was one of the many Gen One boys Dragos bred as assassins in his labs? Maybe he'd somehow escaped his horrific enslavement as Hunter had. Maybe her son wasn't living at all anymore. For one shameful second, she wished him dead, if only to spare him the bleak existence Hunter had described.