Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
Jen
I finish the coffee Dean made me and he clears his throat. "Harek."
Harek's head comes up. Green eyes find Dean in the rearview.
"The folder. The one from the medical wing. Can you grab it?"
A pause. Harek's hand on mine goes still. "Yes."
"Get it out."
Harek doesn't move for a second. He's looking at Dean. Then he reaches down between his boots and pulls the duffel up onto his knees, and from inside it he draws out the manila folder I last saw on the kitchen table of the cabin. He sets it on the seat between us. He doesn't let go.
"Dean," I say.
"You want me to look at it right now?"
"I do."
"In a moving truck. In the middle of the night."
"Yes."
Thaw turns half in the passenger seat. His gold eyes go to Dean. He hasn't been told this is coming either.
"What didn't you show her in the cabin?" Thaw says.
"The math behind the marker score," Dean says. "The seven-point-four. I’ve been studying that file."
I look at Dean in the rearview. He's keeping his eyes on the road. His jaw is tight.
"Why now?"
"Because I found information about you. Because we're four hours out from the safehouse and I can't justify you not knowing."
I look at Harek.
"Show me."
Harek opens the folder.
He turns past the spreadsheet I have already seen. He turns past the patient file with my driver's license photo. He stops at a page I have not seen.
It is a chart, hand-drawn over a printed table. Years across the horizontal axis. The graph goes back forty years.
"What am I looking at?" I ask.
"The breeding program's outcomes," Dean says. "Forty years of attempts. Each row is a pairing. Each pairing is a registry woman matched with a donor."
I read down the table.
The outcome column repeats the same words in different combinations. Maternal mortality. Embryonic failure. Mid-term termination. No viable issue. Page after page of it.
I look for the line that says anything else.
Six lines. In forty years. Six.
The outcome column on those six lines says live birth.
Beside live birth, another column. Offspring outcome.
Failed to thrive, terminated month 4. Failed to thrive, terminated month 7. Behavioral instability, terminated year 3. Behavioral instability, terminated year 5. Retained, deployed. Retained, deployed.
"Until five years ago these were separate programs. The operators started going feral. The breeding program had been failing for forty years. Somebody put them together. We know this part."
I look at the page again.
“So why am I looking at all of this again Dean?”
Dean glances at the rearview. He's quiet for a long second.
"The Syndicate's panel screens for atypical biology in routine bloodwork," he says.
"Hemoglobin that doesn't match a fully human reference range.
Hormonal patterns that read off. A specific marker they identified about thirty years ago that correlates with hybrid bloodlines.
Plus high fertility indicators on the standard reproductive panel. "
"Mine."
"Yours came back positive on every category they screen for. The composite score is the seven-point-four. Highest the registry has ever produced in forty years of looking."
"Higher than any of the mothers in this folder."
"Every one of them was trace-hybrid. Bloodline too far back to register on a standard panel.
The Syndicate caught them because the panel was sensitive enough to find faint signal.
They tried to breed full hybrids out of trace-hybrid mothers and the mothers died, or the children died, because the bodies couldn't carry. "
"And the theory was."
"Find a mother whose body wasn't trace-hybrid. Find a mother whose body was already most of the way to hybrid. See if her body could carry what no trace-hybrid mother could."
"They've been refining the panel for forty years."
"Looking for stronger hybrid signal."
"Looking for me."
"Looking for someone like you."
I close my eyes.
I have been remarkably healthy my whole life.
I have never been sick. I have a pain tolerance that is very high.
I have never broken a bone. I have always been able to read animals in a way other animal control officers could not — the dogs going quiet around me, the feral cats not running.
I have always known when somebody in a room was lying.
I have always known when somebody was about to be violent.
I thought it was instinct. I thought it was experience. I thought I had a good gut.
I have a hybrid body. I have had a hybrid body for thirty-one years.
The patch on my chest is not the start of something.
It is something inside me that has been there my whole life and has finally pushed up to the surface where I could see it.
The Syndicate's panel reader recognized what was in my blood from a vial of it in February.
I open my eyes. "Dean," I say.
"Yes."
"The two surviving adults."
"They're out there. They're working for the Syndicate."
I sit with it. The forest outside has started to go gray with morning light. I have to ask the question. I have been carrying it since the cabin.
"Has it already happened?" I ask.
Nobody in the truck moves.
Thaw's hand on the back of my seat does not move. Harek's hand on mine does not move. Dean's hands on the wheel do not move. The truck rolls forward in the dark and nobody answers for a long beat.
"You've been thinking about it," I say to Dean.
"Yes."
"All of you?"
"All of us."
"Since when?"
"Since the cell,” Thaw says.
"And you didn't say."
"No. None of us did. We have been waiting for your body to tell us. Or for you to ask."
"And you held me through the nights and you slept with one arm around me and you didn't say it."
"I didn't say it because I don't have an answer. I would smell it if it were further along. I can't smell it now. I don't know whether that means it isn't happening or whether it means it's too early."
"Harek."
Harek's green eyes meet mine.
"Maybe."
We keep driving. The sun is coming up over the ridge.
I put my hand on my belly.