Page 34 of Dark Gambit: The Play

Tom looked at the doctor, or rather the tablet propped on a stand in front of Julian. Someone was watching on the other side, which meant that Tom wasn't the boss. Someone else was, and he didn't want her to see him.

When no one answered her, she repeated the question. "Is that a yes or a no?"

"It's irrelevant to our discussion," Tom said. "I assume that there are many Kra-ell females in your community who are there against their will, and who are compelled to hold their grief inside them and not tell anyone how they got there. They deserve to be freed, and we need your help to do that. I assume that you are fully human. Is that correct?"

Sofia nodded.

"Were you born to a hybrid father and a human mother?"

"The other way around," Marcel said. "As unlikely as it is, her mother is the other."

Tom looked at her with a raised brow. "Is that true?"

Marcel had guessed it from what she'd stupidly told him about her parents, and they knew so much already that there was no reason to deny it. "My mother took a human lover to piss off my grandfather. She didn't expect to get pregnant, and she wasn't happy about it. But the Kra-ell don't believe in abortion, so here I am."

"That makes you very unique," Tom smiled as if she'd just told him some great news.

Sofia shrugged. "I'm still human, and other than my coloring and my body shape, I didn't inherit anything else from that side of my family, and I'm thankful for it. I like my human side much more. My father, the real one, is a great guy who loves me unconditionally, and I have two aunts who were much more like mothers to me than the female who gave birth to me. I also have cousins and friends, and some of those friends are hybrids. As I said, there are many good people in the compound, and if you try to free the pureblooded females, many of them will get hurt or killed." She sighed. "Frankly, as much as I feel bad about the terrible thing that was done to the pureblooded females, they are not worth the lives of the other people in our community."

"I have a question," Mia asked. "We know that a hybrid and a human produce a human child. How about two hybrids? Are their children human or hybrid as well?"

"As far as I know, the children born to hybrid females are fathered by pureblooded males. But the Kra-ell are not exclusive, so it's difficult to tell who has sex with whom and why. The Kra-ell females have an odd fertility cycle. Since they want to preserve their blood, I assume that they hook up with purebloods while they are fertile, and with hybrids when they are not. Or maybe they use protection when having sex with hybrids and humans. Though my mother obviously didn’t use contraceptives.” She let out a breath. "You might be surprised to know that, but most of what I know is based on rumors and guesses. Humans are not privy to the inner workings of the Kra-ell society, not even a human like me who has Kra-ell blood in her."

She'd almost blurted out ‘a human whose grandfather is Igor's second-in-command,’ but she had stopped herself at the last moment. It was better that they didn't know she was so-called connected, especially since that connection didn't make her any more knowledgeable or important than the other humans in their community.

"How many of each category of people are there?" Marcel asked. "Purebloods, hybrids, and humans. Adults, children, males, females. We need to know what we are up against."

She cast him a glare. "I hope that you are not thinking about attacking a community that has children and other innocents just to free some stuck-up Kra-ell females."

"We are not," Tom said. "But we need to ascertain the risk to us."

"What risk? And to whom? Igor wouldn't have sent me to snoop around if one of ours hadn't found the Safe Haven website so fascinating that she spent unreasonable amounts of time on it. Was she looking for compellers who could do for her what you did for me?"

Tom smiled. "I have no way of knowing what that person was looking for. I'm not a mind reader. I need those numbers, though."

23

KIAN

Sofia shifted her gaze away from Toven. "I don't know the exact numbers."

"Ask Toven to make her tell us," Turner said.

The god didn't have to be told. "Give it your best guess. How many purebloods, hybrids, and humans are there in your compound?"

Sofia looked at him with hurt in her eyes. "There are over a hundred purebloods. Twenty or so of them are children and teenagers. More or less the same number of hybrids, and about a hundred and twenty humans, of whom about a quarter are children."

"What's the male-to-female ratio?" Marcel asked.

She gave him the same hurt look she'd given Toven. "The adult purebloods are divided almost equally, just a little tilted toward males, but together with the children, I think there are about sixty males and forty females. The hybrids have many more males, the ratio being closer to four to one. Humans, as you'd expect, are divided more or less equally."

"Igor must have an inner circle," Toven said. "How many are in it?"

"Sixteen males." Sofia let out a breath. "It's easy to figure out who they are. They don't have collars around their necks."

"Collars?" Marcel asked.

She nodded. "All the other purebloods and hybrids wear collars. No one knows what they are for. Some think that they denote rank, others think that they have location trackers in them." She rubbed a hand over her thigh. "But that's probably not true since he obviously implants them in us. But then the hybrids and purebloods hardly ever leave the compound other than to hunt, so maybe the collars are really trackers."