Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Jen
The new safehouse is at the bottom of a road that does not exist on a map.
Dean drives off the highway around five-twenty in the morning onto a track that I would not have called a road — gravel, then dirt, then two faint ruts through fir trees and we follow it for twenty minutes down into a valley with a huge rock overhang, almost like a clearing-sized cave.
Under that is a log home, two-story, with a porch. There is a porch swing.
The twins built this. The twins have been living here, in some sense, for two years.
We pull up. Dean kills the engine. Nobody moves. The cab is warm.
"We're here," Dean says.
"How long until the other truck?" I ask.
"Three to four hours. They had to take the long route. They'll come in through the south."
"Okay."
I open my door. The air outside is cold and gray and full of the resin smell of forest.
I stretch my body out after sitting for so long.
A small wave of heat hits me. Warmth, low in my pelvis. Not the heat from the cabin. Smaller. Faster. Sharper at the edges.
I steady myself on the truck door.
Thaw is at my elbow immediately. "Jen?"
"I'm fine."
"You're not. Tell me what."
"It's not the heat. Not the same kind. It's something else."
His gold eyes go careful. He reads my body, and what he finds makes his jaw set.
"Inside," he says.
Harek is out of the truck behind me with our duffel on his shoulder.
He doesn't say anything. He just falls in at my other side, his free hand finding the small of my back, and he walks me up the porch steps that way — Thaw on the right, Harek on the left, the two of them braced around me without comment.
The warm width of Harek's palm at my spine is comforting. The patch on my chest is humming. And Harek's hand is steady on me.
We get inside.
The house is warm and lived in. The twins have a wood stove set up and Dean moves over to light it. There are clean blankets folded on the back of the couch. There is a coffee maker on the counter that has been left half-full.
It is a home.
I sit down on the couch. My legs feel wobbly.
Thaw sits on the coffee table in front of me, close, and his hands take both of mine.
Harek sets the duffel down by the door and crosses to the couch and folds onto the floor by my feet, not touching, his back against the couch frame, one shoulder against my knee through the sweats.
"Tell me what it feels like," Thaw says.
"I don't know."
"Try."
I try. "Like the heat from the cabin, but smaller. Lower. And bright. Like there's a light on inside my pelvis. Not painful. Just aware."
"Aware how."
"I don't know how. I just feel it. I feel my body. I feel into my body in a way I haven't before. The patch is humming. The bonds are humming. Everything is —"
I stop.
There is a thought trying to land. I do not want it to.
Thaw is watching me. Dean is in the kitchen pouring water from the kettle into a glass and his hands have stopped moving. Harek's shoulder against my knee has gone very still.
The thought lands.
I say it.
"Could these be pregnancy symptoms?"
The room goes quiet.
Harek does not move. Thaw's hands tighten around mine.
The men have read that I need the question in the air without being answered, and they have stopped for me.
The cold sweeps through me. Hands first, then the back of my neck, then the inside of my arms. The folder was not the worst news.
The folder was the warning, and the warning was already late.
The men I am bonded to acted on a heat that was mine, and my body did what my body was built to do, and there is nobody in this room I can be angry with for the math actually adding up the way the math was projected to add up.
I have been furious at the Syndicate and the fury has been a thing I could carry. The fury does not fit this.
Harek's shoulder presses, very slightly, into the side of my knee. He is not soothing. He is reminding me he is here.
I let Thaw speak.
"I don't know, Jen. None of us — Crull, Harek, me — none of us have ever been a father. None of us knows whether the biology works the way they projected."
"So we wait."
"We wait."
"How long."
"Days. Maybe weeks. There's no test in this house. There's no clinic we can walk into without lighting up every Syndicate alert in three counties."
I close my eyes.
I have been waiting for things for weeks.
Waiting for an alarm. Waiting for a cell door.
Waiting for guards. I am tired of waiting.
I am extremely tired of waiting. And what I am being asked to wait for now is whether my body is currently doing the thing the Syndicate spent forty years trying to engineer it to do.
I open my eyes.
I look down at Harek. He has turned his head a fraction so he can see my face from the floor. His green eyes are on mine. The shimmer at his collarbones is slow and steady. He is not telling me anything. He is just looking at me, the way he has looked at me since the kitchen.
I put my hand on his broad shoulder. He closes his eyes for one breath. His head turns into my arm.
"Okay," I say to the room. My voice is level.
"Okay. I can't do anything about whether I am or I'm not, right now, in this house.
So I'm going to sit. I'm going to eat something.
I'm going to drink water. I'm going to lie down and take a nap.
And when the other truck gets here, I'm going to be alive and breathing and not in pieces, because the alternative is that I spiral, and I don't have time to spiral. "
Thaw's gold eyes are on my face.
"That sounds like a perfect plan."
"No it’s not, but the alternative involves tears and alcohol."
His mouth twitches — the small one, the version he uses when he's not allowed to laugh but wants to.
"Eat," he says. "Drink. Lie down. We'll be here."
"And you, Jen?" Dean asks.
I look at him.
"I have a job to do when the other truck pulls in. The job is be standing up when Fen sees me again. That's the thing I have. Everything else is for later."
Dean gives me a small smile and looks at me, almost with pride.
"That'll do."
I eat food Harek puts in front of me at the kitchen table.
I drink water from a glass Harek refills before I have asked.
I do not know when Harek went from being the quiet enormous one at the back of the cabin to being the man whose hands I am tracking in every room I enter, but here we are.
He hasn't said three sentences all morning.
I go upstairs. Harek finds a bedroom for me at the front of the house — a room with one window looking into the firs, a real bed, a dresser, a worn rug. He turns down the bed. He goes back to the duffel and brings me a clean change of clothes and sets them on the dresser.
I lie down and Thaw sits in the wooden chair by the bed and Harek folds onto the floor at the foot of it like a guard dog — not exactly that, because guard dogs do not have shimmer pulsing slow under their skin and they do not lean their head against the side of the mattress where they know my hand can find them — and Dean is somewhere in the front of the house doing whatever wolves do at dawn.
I reach my hand down off the side of the mattress. Harek's hand is already there waiting for it.
I sleep.
I do not dream. I just go under faster than I expected to, because Harek's hand is in mine and Thaw is three feet from the bed and the bonds are full and warm and the room is warm and the threat is four hours away from this house, and I come back up to morning light through the window.
The cabin is warm. The bonds are humming.
I am wet.
I sit up too fast. The sheet under my hips is —
I look.
There is blood on the sheet.
For one second I think period, and the relief that washes through me is so violent it makes me lightheaded — not pregnant, not pregnant, the body is doing the body's normal thing — and I almost laugh. I almost cry. I sit up and pull the sheet back to confirm.
I confirm. And then I stop.
Because the blood is wrong.
It is not the color it should be. It is too dark.
Not period-dark. Ink-dark. It is the color of the shape under the skin of my chest, the patch color, the same exact shade — and I look at the sheet again and the blood is steaming.
Faintly. The way a cup of coffee steams. A small heat coming off it. Not body-temperature heat. Hotter.
And at the edge where the blood meets the cotton of the sheet, the cotton is going brown.
Not stained brown. Scorched brown. A fine ring of darkened fiber, the kind of scorch you get from heat without flame.
I'm out of the bed before I've decided to be.
Harek is at my side before Thaw is — he was on the floor at the foot of the bed and he is on his feet in a fraction of a second, his green eyes already going to the sheet. Thaw is up out of the chair right behind him. Dean is at the bedroom door in seconds.
"Jen —"
"It's not a period, Thaw. Look at it. That's not blood. Look at the sheet."
Thaw looks.
His face goes blank.
He doesn't speak. He doesn't move. He just stands at the bedside and looks at what is on the cotton. He has worked for the Syndicate. He has seen horrible things. He's looking at the sheet on my bed with the careful blank of a man who hasn't seen this.
Harek is already on one knee at the bedside. His green eyes go to the blood and he does the thing he does with my body — the long deliberate scenting breath, the head tilted. He looks at the cotton. He looks at the steam.
He looks up at me.
"Activation."
Dean's head comes up sharp.
"The marker?"
Harek nods.
"It's starting."
The bedroom goes very still.
Dean is the first one to move. He crosses to the dresser, picks up a clean towel from the stack, and hands it to Harek. Harek folds it once and presses it to the sheet to absorb without smearing. He is doing it with the same long careful slowness he does everything.
I sit on the edge of the bed with the blood from my own body steaming on a sheet a few inches from my hip, and what the Syndicate's panel reader marked on a chart is happening in this bedroom in real time, and the three men in the room with me know exactly what they are looking at.
I am not pregnant. I don’t think. I don’t know. What I know is that the marker score the Syndicate gave me is not a projection anymore. The hybrid breed they could not name is naming itself on a cotton sheet at the bottom of a road that does not exist on a map.
Harek's hand tightens once around mine.