Chapter Twelve

Ilya couldn’t believe that Aubrey was looking at her as though she had never seen her before. It was frustrating and almost infuriating in a way that Ilya couldn’t quite put into words.

“You’ve been to the Izalux factory?” Aubrey asked.

“It’s the Orion Corporation factory,” Ilya said, “but yes, I have. But you already knew that, Aubrey.”

Ilya saw Aubrey’s face change as she went through a series of emotions in response to what she had said. At first, she seemed confused, almost repelled, by the assertion, but then slow realization washed over her and her expression relaxed as her eyes widened. She took a small step toward Ilya.

“You,” she said softly. “You were in the lab.”

Ilya nodded.

“I was,” she said. “I didn’t think that you would remember.”

“I didn’t,” Aubrey admitted. “I didn’t recognize you when I saw you. You were barely noticeable when you were in the lab.”

“Well, thank you.”

“No,” Aubrey said. “That’s not what I meant. I’m sorry. It’s just—you were so quiet. You kept totally to yourself. I never even saw you talking to anyone else. You were working on a different project, so I didn’t get a chance to interact with you. But I remember you. I remember you being there.”

“Do you remember me leaving?”

Aubrey nodded and took another step toward her.

“I do,” she said, her voice still softened as if she had forgotten that there was anyone else in the room with them and she was only speaking directly to Ilya. “You were there one day and then the next, you were just gone. There was a little bit of an upheaval because nobody could figure out what had happened to you. You hadn’t let anyone know that you weren’t going to be coming back in and no one knew how to get in touch with you, so we couldn’t check in on you. After a few days, though, we all just assumed that you had found another job somewhere else and hadn’t told anyone because you didn’t really socialize with anyone so there wasn’t anything to say. Those who were working on the same project that you were said that one of the very few things that they knew about you was that you didn’t have any family.”

“That’s true,” Ilya said. “I didn’t have anybody. It’s easy for someone to just disappear without anyone noticing when they don’t have anyone in their lives to care that they are gone. That’s what made it so easy for them to capture me and put me in the program. No one missed me when I was gone, so no one came looking for me.”

“That’s not true,” Aubrey said. “We did wonder where you were, but there was nothing that we could do. You didn’t have any contact information on file and since you didn’t socialize with anyone there was no way for us to get in contact with you or to check to make sure that you were really alright. We couldn’t look for you. Besides, there was someone in the lab who said that they heard you were dating someone.”

“They did?” Ilya asked, taken aback by the revelation.

“Yes,” Aubrey said. “They said that you had been seeing someone for a while, but that you were being quiet about it just like you were quiet about everything else. We figured that even with as quiet as you were, there would be some kind of indication that you were dating someone if there wasn’t something wrong with the relationship. He would have come to the lab to visit you or you would have eaten with him some time rather than always bringing your lunch. It wasn’t until you disappeared that we started to wonder if maybe you were dating someone who was in the University. Since being involved with someone in certain positions or departments wasn’t allowed, you would have to be quiet about the relationship. We thought that maybe someone in their department or their superior found out about the relationship and threatened consequences, so the two of you ran off together.”

Ilya was surprised. She didn’t think that the people who had shared the same lab before she was captured even recognized that she existed a lot of the time, much less cared enough to go to that much trouble to think of reasons why she might have disappeared. While it felt like an invasion of her privacy for them to be conjecturing about her personal life and the motivations behind her leaving, it was also reassuring that they at least noticed that she was gone. She didn’t want to go any further into what had happened, but she knew that she needed to. The only chance that she might have to convince them to stay away from the factory was to tell them what she had gone through. She nodded.

“I was seeing someone,” she admitted.

“Was he a part of the University?” Aubrey asked.

Ilya looked into the faces of each of the people in the room, wanting to make sure that they were listening.

“Yes,” she said. “It was Ryan.”

Shocked gasps filled the room around her and Aubrey knew that her revelation had had the impact that she wanted it to. It wasn’t something that she wanted to talk about. In all truth, it was something that she didn’t even want to think about any longer. If she could completely eradicate him from her memory, she would. In that moment, however, he was virtually all that she could think about.

“You were involved with Ryan?” Aubrey asked, her voice sounding stunned.

Ilya felt a hard kick on the side of her belly and involuntarily pressed her hand against it. She felt Jonah take her by the arm and start guiding her back toward the chairs positioned around the table in the window.

“Sit down,” he instructed. “Relax.”

“Thank you,” Ilya said.

The feeling of the sun on her skin, even through the glistening-clean window panes, was wonderful. It had been nearly a year since she had been able to be out in the sun and simply savor its warmth and beauty.

Aubrey and the men settled into chairs around her and she could feel them looking at her expectantly. They wanted to know more, and even though she was reluctant to share it, she took a breath and forced herself to say the words that they needed to hear.

“He was one of the assigned mentors during a project that I did when I was studying at the University,” she started. “We had a good rapport then and I was pretty disappointed when the project ended and I wasn’t able to see him every day anymore.”

“How could you be so attracted to him?” Aubrey asked.

“Ryan is far more charming than you give him credit for,” Ilya said. “Besides, there was no way of knowing anything that he was doing. It wasn’t as though he talked about it. He was kind and attentive and flattering. I liked the attention. I hate to even say that now. It makes me feel so incredibly stupid that I fell for it.”

“You don’t need to feel stupid,” Aubrey said.

“Don’t you think that I had heard all of the rumors about Ryan?” she asked. “I had heard everything that people said about him. I was fully informed of the type of man he was, and yet I still let myself be attracted to him like some little puppy. It was like I thought I was somehow special.”

“So, what happened? Were you seeing him from the time that you were in that project?”

Ilya shook her head.

“No,” she said. “After that project, I didn’t see him for another couple of years. Then I started working in the lab and I ran into him again. Of course, I was thrilled to see him and he seemed really happy to see me, too. He told me that he had been thinking about me since we had worked together and that he had been hoping that we would have the opportunity to work together again. That just swept me away even more. He had just been my mentor and yet he talked about it as though we had made some sort of incredible discovery together. I was standing there with this powerful, famous scientist telling me that I impress him and that he wanted to be able to work with me. There was nothing that I could do. I couldn’t resist him.”

“Were you serious?” Aubrey asked. “Is that what happened? Did the Science Head find out about the two of you and threaten him?”

Ilya shook her head.

“No,” she said. “Nothing that dramatic. We were actually quite casual. We saw each other when we had the chance. We would grab dinner or sometimes take a weekend together. I wish I had just left it at that and allowed it to fizzle out naturally, but I just couldn’t. The longer that I spent with him, the less that I could resist him. I fell harder every time that I saw him. Even though I was still hearing the same rumors about him, I wanted to be more serious. I thought that I could change his ways and convince him that I was the one he was supposed to be with. No matter what I heard, I thought that I could be the one who was different. I just had to convince him. I had to show him that I could make him happy. When I told him, though, he didn’t feel the same way.”

“What did he say?”

Ilya sighed.

“Basically, what you would expect him to. That I was great and that he had fun with me, but that he wasn’t interested in anything more than what we had. That should have convinced me. That should have been all that I needed to hear to make me walk away from him and chalk him up as a lesson learned. But, of course, it didn’t. He was so incredibly manipulative. I can see that now. I know now that that is what it was, but I couldn’t then. When I was there, when I was in it, all I felt was what I thought was love. I figured that it might just take him a little bit longer, but that if I felt this strongly, it had to be something more than just a casual attraction. I couldn’t help myself. I had to keep pursuing him. I found out that he had been going to the Orion Corporation factory and I decided that I was going to follow him there. It would change up our routine, force him to hear me out while I explained why he should commit to me.”

“What did you see there?”

Ilya’s mind resisted her efforts to bring the memories forward. She didn’t want to think about them. She didn’t want to have to remember what it was like to live those last few moments of freedom in terror.

“I don’t really know how to explain it. The building itself looked almost like it had already been abandoned. It was old and outdated from the outside. The parking lot was empty except for two cars and the pavement was broken up from all of the plants growing up through it. I recognized Ryan’s car and went inside. I wanted to get a look of what was in there before I went, but the windows were boarded up or painted black, so I couldn’t see anything.”

“What happened when you went inside?”

“I don’t even know how to describe the inside of the building. It was like the factory was in layers. Equipment that looked a century old or more was still there, but newer technology had been patched on top of it over and over to create these strange monster machines. The sound they made was ungodly. I couldn’t even hear myself think. I went by the machinery so fast I didn’t even see what it was doing.”

“Did you see anything other than the machinery?”

“There were rooms,” Ilya said. “I can only guess that they were the storage that the Valdicians were talking about. They were filled with crates marked ‘Orion Corporation, Izalux”. Some of the other rooms were full of what looked like every part that they could possibly need to fix the machinery if it broke down, shipping supplies, and huge cases of what I assume was ingredients for the Izalux.”

“Is that all?”

Ilya shook her head.

“I could hear something deep in the factory. It was voices, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I followed them and saw more rooms and another floor of machines. Then I found a room that had been completely blacked out. The ceiling, floor, and windows were all totally black.”

“Just like the women in the lab said the other day,” Jonah pointed out.

Aubrey nodded.

“That room,” she said. “Was there anything in it? Did you see anything other than the blackness?”

“I didn’t really see it,” Ilya said, “but it was like I could feel that there were people there looking at me. I knew that the room wasn’t empty. I got away from it and went down the hallway as fast as I could. When I turned a corner, I saw another room that looked like the black one, but there was light coming out of it.”

“Light?” Aubrey asked.

“Not a lot,” Ilya said. “Not like there was a lamp turned on inside or there were bulbs in the ceiling or anything. Just a small amount of light. Faint. Almost silvery. I didn’t want any of the people in there to see me, so I started back the way that I came. At least that’s what I thought that I was doing. I ended up getting lost and in another wing of the factory. There was no machinery there, but I could hear more voices. These sounded scared, sometimes like they were crying. I couldn’t open any of the doors that I found and there were no windows. The further that I went, the louder the voices got. Then I heard footsteps behind me.”

“Why didn’t you stop?” Jonah asked. “Why didn’t you just find the nearest door out of the building and leave?”

Ilya turned toward him, her lips curved in a rueful smile.

“Because I knew that Ryan was somewhere in there,” she said simply. “Nothing else really mattered to me then. I had to talk to him. I felt like I had no other choice. I knew that if I could just talk to him, if I could just tell him, then he would understand and we could be together.”

“Tell him what?” Aubrey asked. “What was so important that you had to put yourself in danger like that just to talk to this guy?”

Ilya hesitated.

“I just needed to talk to him,” she said firmly, hoping that the tone of her voice would tell them that she wasn’t interested in going any further down that line of conversation.

“Did you ever find Ryan?” Jonah asked.

Ilya nodded.

“I did,” she said. “I was so relieved. I knew that everything was going to be fine. We would talk and he would see that we were meant to be together. He would get me out of the factory and we would start our life together.”

“What happened?” Gannon asked.

“It was all so fast,” Ilya said. “One moment I was talking to Ryan and the next I was being dragged out of the room by these creatures in long robes. I had no idea what or who they were.”

“Valdicians,” Jonah said quietly.

Ilya nodded.

“They brought me into one of the rooms and that’s all I remember from the factory. The next thing that I was aware of was being in the breeding facility in the lab. He had me hooked up to all kinds of machines and there were other women in the tanks around me. He never explained anything. I had to find out what was happening to me in the few minutes that I had to talk to the other women when we were doing our work.”

“Work?” Aubrey asked.

“We spent a lot of our time in the tanks, but we also had to participate in other elements of the experiments. I think that Ryan got himself in over his head in a way. He had these tremendous visions for all of the amazing hybrids that he would be able to create and what he would be able to accomplish with them, but I don’t think that he considered what it would take to sustain the powerful rapid growth that he achieved. The nursery and the training programs were handled by other hybrids or the men that Ryan chose, but the human women did things like cooking and sewing and cleaning unless our pregnancies showed signs of distress or we were undergoing tests. Interacting with the other women during those jobs was how I found out about everything that he was doing.”

“If he had a personal relationship with you, though, at least he must have treated you better than the other women who were in the breeding program,” Jonah said.

Ilya met his eyes again and let out a long breath.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No.”