Cyborg Nation by Kaitlyn O'Connor (english readers TXT) 📗

He glanced at Gideon when she’d finished and when Gideon only nodded, sprawled on his back beside her and closed his eyes. Gideon had said he had the last watch the night before, she remembered. It was no wonder he looked so tired when it had been so long since he’d rested. After studying him a moment, Bronte yielded to the urge to touch him, stroking his face soothingly. He smiled faintly but in a moment his face relaxed and he began to breathe heavily with sleep.

She looked away from him as Gideon settled on her other side, her gaze going instantly to the cut she’d noticed on him that was still bleeding. The slash across his ribs wasn’t even as deep as Gabriel’s, but because it was almost completely horizontal gravity was working against the industrious little nanos. He caught her face in the crook of his hand, tipping her face up for his inspection. “It will close,” he said finally, lifting a finger and rubbing at the worried line between her brows.

Releasing her after a moment, he settled on his side on one elbow looking up at her. She gazed back at him questioningly for a moment and finally reached for him, tugging until he finally settled his head in her lap. He released a deep sigh, closing his eyes as she stroked his temple as she had Gabriel’s.

After a few minutes, Jerico sat down behind her. His back bumped hers and she tipped her head to glance back at him. He nuzzled the side of his face along hers for a moment and then returned his attention to his watch.

Cramped and uncomfortable as she was, and despite the ordeal they’d just endured, or maybe because of it, Bronte felt a blissful peace settle inside of her.

Amusement flickered to life as it dawned on her she was sitting like a blissful idiot among some of the most deadly men in the universe. It was a little like sitting in the midst of a pride of lions and petting them as if they were kittens.

Chapter Twenty

It was one of those moments when one’s mind connects dot to dot, wandering idly from one thought to another until a wholly unexpected picture emerges. Bronte was exhausted. They’d been traveling for more than a week, stopping to sleep—although no one else got even nearly as much sleep as she did since the men took turns standing watch—eat, and occasionally just to rest for a brief time. She knew she didn’t have nearly as much reason for her exhaustion as the men did—and they didn’t even look half as exhausted as she felt. Occasionally she would walk for a short period to stretch her legs and give them a break from carrying her, but mostly they carried her. And she was healing well. She thought if it wasn’t for the splint on her leg she could’ve walked more and hardly held them back at all—except she couldn’t take the splint off yet and dragging one heavy, stiff leg wore her out fairly quickly.

Then, abruptly, while cataloguing her ailments and wondering why she was so fatigued, it dawned on her that she hadn’t had her period even once since she’d been captured. Her heart performed a little two-step when the thought hit her. Mentally, she stopped, rewinding, and then going back over everything in her mind, but she knew even before she did that she wasn’t mistaken. She was prone to put that little monthly disability out of her mind as soon as it wasn’t a problem anymore, but she’d been captured with only the clothes she stood up in—nothing else. She wouldn’t have had her period and then blithely dismissed it if it had presented a real ‘problem’ like it would have if she hadn’t had feminine products to get her through it.

Excitement followed that thought and then died just as quickly.

She couldn’t be pregnant.

She might have been, but there was no way she could still be pregnant after the crash. She’d been injured too badly, lost too much blood, and the site of her injury had been close enough to cause trauma to her reproductive organs, might even have totally destroyed one of her ovaries. She’d feared that possibility at the time, she remembered.

She would’ve miscarried. Even if that metal rod had miraculously missed everything of vital importance, the shock to her system would’ve been enough to cause her to miscarry.

Her memories directly after the crash weren’t reliable. Probe them though she might, she couldn’t recall anything that indicated vaginal bleeding. Her stomach had hurt, naturally enough—she’d hurt all over—but there was no way to distinguish, now, if there’d been anything beyond her actual injuries causing pain. She couldn’t remember anything like the cramping that she should’ve experienced with a miscarriage.

She still hadn’t started, though, and it had been weeks now since the crash.

She didn’t know what to make of it, but she found that she couldn’t summon even a flicker of hope that something wonderful and miraculous had happened to her. Fear dominated her mind. All she could think of was the impossibility of being pregnant and the likelihood that something terrible was going on inside of her. She’d never thought she was a pessimist. She was more inclined to go the other way, but she was a physician and she was a realist in that respect.

God only knew what the nanos, encountering a ruptured ovary, had decided to do to ‘fix’ it. It was bad enough the nanos had been designed for cyborgs, but hers had been designed for male cyborgs.

She hadn’t considered that before.

“Are you ill?”

Bronte sent Gideon a wide eyed look at that question, wondering if he’d noticed something she hadn’t.

“You have turned as pale as death.”

Bronte blinked rapidly at that, her mind scurrying around for some explanation other than the truth. “I … uh … It’s nothing, really. I just had a little dizziness.” That much was the truth, anyway. She felt faint with fright