‘I’m going to call him Kai,’ Annalise says.
She stands over the cot looking down at the baby. He’s just over six weeks old and he has soft black hair and a mid-brown smooth skin tone that shows off his mixed heritage. Beside her is a short woman in a nurse’s uniform. Her hair is pulled back from her face, and she holds a very serious and professional expression as she gazes down at the child.
‘Is he making good progress, Matron?’ Annalise asks. ‘No defects?’
‘He’s adorable. And perfect,’ says Matron. ‘He’ll be an excellent asset.’
Annalise nods. In contrast to the plain Matron, her stunning white hair falls over her shoulders like a blanket of pure snow. She’s wearing a turquoise kaftan over her athletic, slim frame. ‘He must have the best of everything. I think he will even call me “Mother”.’
‘Of course, he will,’ says the nurse. ‘They all will.’
The nurse makes no judgement at this request, though she knows Annalise is 60. Because who would ever think this beautiful woman could be such an age with her timeless perfection?
Annalise glances around the nursery. There are seven cots in the room, all with tiny occupants. Three girls and four boys, including Kai. None as old as three months and all from a variety of sources.
‘Such a shame the mother of this one didn’t survive,’ Matron says. ‘But the others are providing him with the milk he needs.’
Annalise looks to the door at the side of the nursery. Yes, there on the other side of the building live the six women who supply sustenance for her children. Though willing recruits, they were separated from their children straight after they gave birth. The women are pampered and cared for, extracting daily the milk required to keep all seven children healthy. Annalise has a series of nurses that come in to take care of the babies, as well as Matron, who monitors them all.
The nurturing will be as efficient as always and as they grow, they will come to know Annalise as their ‘true’ mother. The one person who cares for them most. Not some unimportant biological sack who carried them for nine months.
As the others before them did, they will give Annalise their undying loyalty. And as they mature, they will train to be the best they can be, before becoming part of her small army.
‘Rest, little one,’ she says to Kai. The baby looks content, having never known any other life than this one.
Annalise leaves the nursing house. A large manor in its own right, built in the 100 acres of land that surrounds the building and which is also the home to her vineyards. She walks across a paved courtyard and enters the north wing of the château. As she passes through the kitchens, the cleaning and serving staff bow their heads but say nothing. It is how she likes it.
Annalise has spent years building this empire. And all through lessons she learned from the Network. Now she is almost ready.
She carries on through the house, passing now to the south side and out again onto yet another courtyard. The property is vast, and another manor lies on this other side. This one contains the school. A huge house, purpose built, with dormitories and classrooms, as well as a gym, a swimming pool and an outside arena to accommodate the training that her students undertake.
She enters the school via the back door and moves silently through the building, looking into classrooms. She’s proud of her children – all of them. For they are even now better than those churned out of the Network’s houses.
If only Beech had known what I was capable of, she thinks. How my kingdom will supersede his.
Twenty-five years ago, Annalise had seen the error of the Network’s ways. Led as they were by Beech, who was stuck in the old ways and not open to evolving even then. Beech had taken over the Network a few years earlier. Annalise had hoped he would improve things but what she’d seen, when the committee sent her to examine the schools, was a devolution from the time when she had been taken and trained by one of the finest houses: the French house.
Back then they’d taken some of Mendez’s work, but until Beech came along, the houses were free to develop their students in their own style. The houses competed with each other in their push for perfection. It was healthy. And then Beech changed it all when he insisted that all Network houses adopt Mendez’s methods fully. By then Mendez had honed his conditioning techniques to create automatons. Beech hadn’t wanted operatives. He’d wanted mindless robots.
But none of this mattered to Annalise, not until Tracey Herod had turned up, and demanded her daughter as a tribute for the Network. Annalise had kept her pregnancy quiet but someone had leaked the news to Beech. Perhaps because she’d refused to surrogate Beech’s own children a couple of years earlier, Beech had become – she was told – enraged by the fact that she had taken a long-term lover, and had subsequently given birth. Beech demanded her child and at the time, Annalise’s stronghold was only a vision she had for the future. She was faced with a dilemma: refuse and lose everything or send the child to the British house as requested.
But which child to send? After all, she had given birth to twins.