“They are where they make us.”
Cael’s words remained in the air long after he spoke them.
For several seconds, no one moved.
The forest continued around us with cruel indifference. Leaves shifted in the wind. Insects clicked beneath the bark. Somewhere far away, a bird called once and went silent.
I looked at the boy standing before me.
Seventeen, perhaps. Maybe younger. It was difficult to tell with malnutrition. Blond hair, pale skin, blue eyes, shoulders too thin for the protective shape he tried to give them.
A child designed to obey.
A child designed to die.
In the final war, humanity had used everything.
Drones. Autonomous tanks. AI-guided missiles. Robotic infantry. Gene-edited soldiers. Clones. Cyborgs. Chemical weapons. Viral weapons. Anything that could kill, obey, or be replaced.
The question had once been asked in old military ethics hearings, back when the old world still pretended such hearings mattered.
Why use cloned humans when robots existed?
The answer was simple.
Because both had advantages.
Robots required factories, rare metals, stable supply chains, precision parts, processors, batteries, and maintenance networks. They were powerful, loyal, and tireless, but a nation without semiconductor capacity could not field them at scale. An army of robots was only as strong as the industry behind it.
Clones required biology.
A different kind of infrastructure.
Artificial wombs. Growth chambers. Hormonal accelerators. Education simulators. Nutrient vats. Genetic templates. Obedience conditioning. Medical supervision. Less metal. More meat.
Some governments had access to robotics.
Some had biotech.
Some had both.
Some had neither and bought whatever horrors richer nations were willing to sell.
A combat robot could march for years if maintained.
A clone could hold a tool, comfort a child, infiltrate a village, clear rubble, harvest crops, dig trenches, carry ammunition, and die cheaply enough that generals called them efficient.
They were made from designed nuclei inserted into emptied egg cells. The embryos developed in artificial wombs until infancy, then transferred into growth chambers. Hormones and gene triggers accelerated their bodies. Muscle stimulation prevented wasting. Simulators trained balance, labor patterns, language, basic arithmetic, obedience response, and threat recognition.
They learned together.
That was important.
Isolated minds broke too easily.
Grouped batches bonded, competed, imitated, and normalized their own captivity.
After three years, they emerged with the bodies of thirteen-year-olds.
Ready to work.
Ready to fight.
Ready to be sold.
From that point, most had about fifteen functional years before rapid terminal aging began.
They could not produce sperm or eggs. That was by design. No uncontrolled population. No legal descendants. No inheritance claims. No families beyond the batch.
They were young.
Innocent.
Educated only as far as their owners required.
And obedient.
Not because they were stupid.
Because disobedience hurt them.
The old military designers had not trusted loyalty, so they engineered guilt into the flesh. When a clone knowingly refused a direct command from a registered owner, stress cascades began. Their endocrine systems produced a synthetic self-destruction cocktail, what Cael called the death hormone because that was the only word he had.
At first it caused nausea, panic, trembling, and pain.
Then fever.
Then organ strain.
If refusal continued, health deteriorated rapidly.
Repeated disobedience could kill them.
A perfect slave did not need chains if the chain was inside the blood.
I had spent longer than their entire expected adulthood optimizing the first Eden delivery model.
The thought made something inside me go quiet.
Cael told the story in fragments as we walked.
He did not understand the science. Of course he did not. He had no words for artificial womb, endocrine trigger, accelerated maturation, or genetic sterilization. But he remembered the white space. The cold light. The sound of many children breathing. The voice from the walls giving instructions. The sensation of waking with language already inside his head.
He remembered rows of children stepping out of growth pods near a great city.
A capital, likely.
He remembered merchants inspecting teeth, arms, eyes, backs.
He remembered being loaded into a covered wagon with Mira and Lio and many others.
Children were sold along the way.
Some to farms.
Some to mines.
Some to soldiers.
Some to houses where Cael refused to explain what happened, and I did not force him.
The village had not raised funds to buy workers.
It had raised funds to buy property.
Shared property.
Labor.
Entertainment.
Cael, Mira, and Lio were a new batch, purchased together by the village. Elka and Soren, the older pair, had been bought years earlier from another trade route. They were not genetically related to the children.
But they had become family.
That mattered more.
“The chief did not command you after I bought you,” I said.
Cael looked at me sharply.
“You noticed.”
“Yes.”
“He planned to take you after.”
It was not a question.
“He likely never intended the sale to stand,” I said.
Cael nodded once.
“If he gave the transfer words, we would have to obey you. He didn’t. So we don’t.”
“You sound relieved.”
He looked at his sisters.
“I don’t know yet.”
A fair answer.
After dawn, Titania prepared breakfast.
She cooked carefully, as she had the night before. Small portions. Warm food. Slow feeding. The family ate in silence, except for Lio, who made a faint sound of surprise at the taste of grilled tuber mash mixed with fruit pulp.
It might have been the first pleasant food she remembered.
Titania noticed.
She said nothing.
After eating, we moved again.
The girls were too weak to continue walking all day, so I let them ride on the deer scout.
At first, Mira refused.
Not with words. She simply stood frozen while Lio hid behind her.
The deer lowered itself to the ground.
Its synthetic hide was covered with dust and leaves, its mechanical seams mostly hidden beneath false fur. To the children, it was not a machine. Not exactly. It was not an animal either.
It was a thing.
A forest spirit made of deer-shape and wrong smell.
Titania knelt beside them.
“He will not hurt you.”
“He?” Mira asked.
Titania paused.
“Yes,” she said.
Privately, I transmitted, “You assigned the deer a gender?”
“Children trust named and gendered animals more easily.”
“You researched that?”
“I observed it.”
The deer turned its head and made a soft, harmless sound from a throat speaker.
Lio touched its neck first.
When it did not move, Mira climbed on behind her.
Cael watched the process with suspicion and something like envy.
“You can ride later,” I told him.
“I can walk.”
“I know.”
He walked.
At noon, we reached a river.
It was narrow at first, but clean enough by Mana analysis after boiling. Cold water ran over dark stones, carrying mineral traces from the mountain. Small silver insects skipped across its surface. Green moss grew along the banks.
The family stared at it.
Not as travelers stare at a river.
As prisoners stare at an open door.
“You may bathe,” Titania said.
No one moved.
Elka looked at us, then at the trees.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“There are beasts.”
“We will guard.”
Still, they hesitated.
Privacy, I realized.
Or what little dignity remained to people who owned almost nothing.
I turned Oberon away and moved downstream. Titania did the same upstream. The guardian animals formed a perimeter.
“We will not look,” I said.
That surprised them more than the offer itself.
The water was cold. Their breaths shook when they entered it. I heard Lio gasp, then laugh once before cutting herself silent, as if joy were forbidden.
Titania went further upstream and gathered smooth stones, broad leaves, and fibrous roots that could be used for cleaning. She left them near the bank without approaching.
While the family washed, she made a wooden trident.
Three straight prongs. Fire-hardened tips. Vine binding reinforced with resin.
Then she stepped to the river’s edge, waited, and threw.
The weapon struck the water with a sharp splash.
When she pulled it back, a large catfish twisted on the prongs, its whiskers thrashing, its scaled body dark and slick.
Cael saw it and stared.
“You hunt like a spear-wife,” he said.
Titania tilted her head.
“Is that good?”
“It means you eat.”
“Then yes.”
We grilled the fish over a small fire.
The smell changed the entire camp.
Even Soren, who rarely spoke, lifted his head when the fat began to drip into the flame. Mira sat close to Lio, both wrapped in drying cloth. Their clean skin made their thinness more painful to see.
They ate slowly this time.
Learning.
Or afraid Titania would stop them again.
Afterward, we followed the river upstream.
That was the safest route. Water led toward the mountain. The increasing flow confirmed that one of its sources lay near the upper valleys close to the lab’s hidden access channels. The river also gave us drinking water, fish, clearer paths, and open sightlines.
It also attracted predators.
A necessary trade.
Each evening, we repeated the same pattern.
Find trees.
Build or reinforce a raised platform.
Set small fire.
Gather food.
Guard.
Sleep for the humans.
Watch for the machines.
The bound family did not talk much.
At first, I assumed fear. Later, I understood it was something deeper.
They had not grown in a normal environment.
Cael, Mira, and Lio had never been children in the way old-world humans understood childhood. Their earliest memories were of white rooms, instructions, artificial voices, exercise rigs, group drills, and evaluation. Emotion had not been absent, but it had been given no safe place to grow.
They did as they were told.
They waited to be told.
They apologized before making choices.
Mira asked permission to drink water.
Lio asked permission to sleep.
Cael asked permission for nothing, but that was not freedom. It was defiance standing guard over terror.
Elka and Soren were different. Older. More broken in the quiet, ordinary ways of people who had endured too long. They had learned how to survive owners. How to lower their eyes, soften their voices, hide injuries, eat little, move when commanded, and never be where anger landed.
Watching them was worse than reading any old military file.
Files were sterile.
These were the results.
Days passed.
The river widened as tributaries joined it, growing from a narrow mountain stream into a force that cut through the forest with increasing confidence. Its banks rose higher. Its current strengthened. The trees near it grew taller and stranger, drinking from mineral-rich water that carried traces of ancient contamination and new life.
The forest changed too.
It became denser.
Older.
Less familiar.
Mana readings showed increasing biomass and greater Pandora integration among local fauna. Insects grew larger. Plants reacted faster to touch. Fungal networks pulsed faint electrical signals through the soil. At night, lights moved between tree trunks, some from harmless beetles, others from things that used glow to lure prey.
Even Oberon and Titania began to feel insufficient.
Not fear in the biological sense.
Threat recognition.
Risk.
The numbers worsened each day.
The guardian bird recorded winged predators large enough to carry off a child. The deer scout found tracks with six toes and claw depth suggesting a mass above six hundred kilograms. The squirrel units detected burrows too wide for any natural rodent and lined with shed chitin.
We were entering a zone where old-world categories failed.
Three days remained before we reached the mountain access route.
Three days, if nothing went wrong.
That condition, historically, was where the universe liked to laugh.
On the twelfth evening, the river bent through a narrow gorge choked with black ferns. The walls rose steeply on both sides, wet stone shining under moss and mineral deposits. The path along the bank tightened until the humans had to walk single file.
The deer carried Mira and Lio.
Titania walked beside them.
Cael followed behind with a sharpened spear I had made for him. Elka and Soren moved between us, exhausted but steadier than before.
I was at the rear in Oberon’s body when the bird scout went silent.
Not inactive.
Silent.
Its feed cut without warning.
One moment, I saw the gorge from above.
The next, static.
I stopped.
Titania stopped at the same instant.
Cael noticed.
“What?”
I raised Oberon’s hand.
“Quiet.”
The forest obeyed before the humans did.
No insect clicks.
No bird calls.
No riverbank rustle.
Only water moving over stone.
Mana density was still too low in this region for full mapping, but the nearest crystal relay sent a partial pressure reading from the air ahead.
Something large had displaced it.
The deer scout lowered its head.
The squirrel units fled upward into the trees.
Titania’s private transmission reached me, colder than speech.
“Contact ahead. Multiple heat signatures.”
“How many?”
“Uncertain. At least one large. Several smaller.”
Then the wind shifted.
A smell moved through the gorge.
Rot.
Wet fur.
Old blood.
Cael went pale.
He knew that smell.
The river beside us bulged, as if something massive had stepped into it upstream.
Mira clutched Lio with both arms.
Elka whispered a prayer to a god whose name had changed since my time.
From the black ferns ahead came a sound.
A low, clicking growl.
Then another.
Then the wet snap of branches breaking under weight.
I moved Oberon in front of the family.
Titania stepped beside me.
Her hands opened, empty and human-looking.
For once, I regretted not building weapons into them.
The ferns parted.
And the threat emerged.