"It's not a big deal," Michael said to Evelyn.
Zoe was listening to them with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep. She knew that Luke wouldn't be fooled, but maybe Michael would be different, though the fact that Luke had brought him along didn't give her a lot of hope for that. She had been able to guess that Eve had bitten him by the sounds. Eve wasn't messy with it, but her body made specific movements. Luke had often forced her to watch it, just to make her uncomfortable. Especially in front of her mother. Her mother hated Eve, a lot. She had been the one leading the Senate's charge to nullify the basic humanitarian plugs on Eve's program.
Basically, her goal had been to let the doctors do whatever got in their cracked skulls. Naturally, that would have most likely killed her. It had upset Zoe enough that she had been banned from the final meeting, where they actually decided on that subject.
She just assumed that Eve would be dead if it had gone through. The Lenoxes were serious about their research, and they would not hesitate to go through humans to get where they were going, or where they thought they were going. They had an excess of humans anyway, thanks to their barely-legal cloning process.
What they didn't have an excess of was influence. Even among the associate families, who had a different idea of morality than others, people, at least, the humans, got uncomfortable. One of the most unfortunate things about humans was that their morals were heavily influenced by... something.
It was a strange phenomenon, but every single human could agree on almost any moral question, though some lied to themselves, and some ignored the answers. There wasn't a single one who didn't have a conscience. Zoe was fairly sure that Luke wasn't actually a human due to that, but her mother wouldn't let her test it.
It didn't matter much anyway. The senators would take any power they could get, and even if Luke was some sort of primordial, as long as enough of them thought he was on their side, they wouldn't take any action against him.
And Luke did have power, despite the associate families' general ignorance, whether it was an honest mistake or a deliberate choice. His power was in his voice. Zoe had felt it. He had once explained to her, convinced her, really, that if she did a certain action, she would be punished harshly. And then he had proceeded to persuade her to do it anyway. And then he had talked her out of the punishment before the Council, after convincing the Council that it was a punishable crime.
He had convinced both her and the Council that the thing that she had done, which she refused to recall, was, or should be, severely punishable, convinced her to do it anyway, then convinced the Council not to punish her for it. And all of that within a single day, then most appeals took at least twelve hours to even get through the receptionist. She was a scary lady.
Luke wasn't trying to hide from them. He wanted the Council to know about him. No, it wasn't just that. He wanted the Council to fear him.
Zoe held her breath for a few seconds as soon as she smelled cooking meat. By her estimation, Kane had gone out to get something for them. She had no idea how he did it, but he never failed to provide anything that they needed. Specifically, anything that she needed, and often anything that she wanted. He could read her shockingly well, for how young he was.
Theoretically, the older and more experienced a guardian was, the more likely they were to be able to align with their master. One of the many benefits of being a guardian was an extremely long life, of a sort. With Zoe it was different. When she was only four, a couple years later than most senators got their first guardian, she had been bound to an old master who was thirteen in his current life. He had died a few days later from incompatibility. Zoe didn't remember anything about him other than his arrogance. He had tried to mold her into what he considered the "perfect senator". Clearly, no one had told him that most children didn't like that. Zoe had just pushed back every time he commanded her, and he had pushed harder, so she had pushed harder still.
And she had killed him because of it.