Page 47

“You understand, right, Isa?” I glanced at her and earned a polite cough and turned head.

“I do. But I also understand there’s protocol for children conceived in a dive.” She patted her barely corporeal hand on the counter, eyes tracing the air. “Jess?”

“Ugh, on it.” She pulled out her phone and spun in her chair, swearing as she scrolled about, tapped her thumb, and held the receiver to her ear.

My stomach twisted in knots, and not in the good way, as she muttered into the phone. “We have a situation to report.”

Jess tapped her fingers as someone prattled on the other line. “Yeah, yeah. We’ve got a conception.”

A long pause.

“Me? Fuck no. Zeke.” She frowned, nose wrinkled. “No. The new kid. Yeah, one of those books.”

I flinched as she scoffed.

“Excuse me, it wasn’t my book. It was Lex’s.” She shot me a half smirk. “Oh, I’d say it was fully consensual.”

I nodded.

“Right. No decisions have been made.” Jess sighed. “C’mon, give the kid a break.”

She shot me a glance and raised a brow. “How could Zeke know better? He barely knew what he was or what he was capable of!”

Jess grumbled. “Alright. Tomorrow, three. Gotcha. We’ll close shop for the day.”

Without another word, Jess hung up and leaned back in her chair with a huff. “You’re lucky Mesmer is more curious than pissed.”

My cheeks burned fiercely as panic bundled in my stomach. “Mesmer?”

She nodded once, avoiding my gaze. “He’s head of the department now.”

“Fuck.” I’d had a brief fling with the male a few decades ago, the passion eventually fizzling out. And though I thought we ended things on good terms, he’d done everything to avoid me since. “What’s… What’s he want done?”

Jess shrugged. “No telling. I mean, you don’t have other kids, do you?”

I shook my head. “That would require that I touch a woman.”

Jess stared me down. “He’s not the first, you know?”

“I know that!” I huffed. “Usually it involves them gender swapping, first.”

Jess shrugged. “Yeah, but you did it the fun way.”

“The fun way? Do you know how the baby comes out?” I stared at her, eyes wide.

“I mean, we can try moving him to another book where they birth some of the other ways…” Jess feigned boredom as she dug around in her bag and held up another tattered paperback.

“What other ways?” I glanced over and she flipped a few pages through and offered me the book.

I centered myself to my key, the metal pulled from the very grounds the library was built upon. I needed to anchor myself the old-fashioned way because my mind buzzed. So, settled in, I skimmed the page as I glanced around a birth scene involving some sort of splitting line on the stomach that sounded like a biologically convenient C-section.

“Better…” I handed her the book back.

“Then there’s the other way… There’s a secondary channel, like they grow an exit.” She gestured. “Or the other way.”

“What other way?”

She gave me the look.