Breedbus -

Thorne’s blood ran cold. “Director Vess. I thought the Ghoul took you.”

But she didn’t stab Vess.

Vess’s body began to convulse. Stitches tore. Her long arm detached at the shoulder and twitched on the floor. The four voices inside her screamed in four different keys, then fell silent. She collapsed, a heap of beautiful, terrible failure. breedbus

She was a Breeder legend, a ghost story. Vess had been the lead geneticist on the original sterilization project. When it failed, she didn't seek a cure. She sought a workaround . If people couldn’t make babies the old way, she’d make them in vats. If the vats failed, she’d stitch viable tissue together into walking, breathing incubators. She called them Amalgams . The cartel called them her daughters. Everyone else called them monsters. Thorne’s blood ran cold

The rain over Neo-Tokyo wasn't water. It was a thin, greasy coolant that bled from the upper city’s ventilation stacks, and it made the neon signs flicker like dying stars. Under that rain, in the gutters of Sector-7, the Breedbus was idling. Vess’s body began to convulse

“Because I’m giving you a choice,” he said. “No one on this bus has ever had one. Not even me.”