Chapter 24 #2
The thought lands clean. It is the cleanest thing in the room. The child is not in my body. The child has never been in my body. The child does not know I exist. The child’s mother does not know I exist.
I do not know how to feel about a child. I do not know if the child is anything. I do not know what the Syndicate has put together inside M. Hollens, but I know it is mine.
I do not know which of the men in this room the other half of the child is from.
That is the thought I was not going to think and I am thinking it.
The folder said compatible hybrid genome.
The folder did not say which hybrid. The donor on the other side of my vial in M.
Hollens’s body could be Thaw. Could be Crull.
Could be Harek. Could be Fen. The Syndicate had access to all four of them.
The Syndicate took material from all four of them.
The match could be any of them and it could be more than one of them in sequence.
The child has biology. The biology has come from somebody specific.
There is an answer. The folder just did not put it on this page.
My hands are not shaking anymore. They are not anything anymore. I am cold.
The patch on my chest is the only thing moving.
I am going to find her. I am going to find her and tell her what is in her and ask her what she wants done about it.
That is the sentence I would say if anyone in this room asked me.
It is a sentence that comes up fast and clean and it is the sentence I am going to use, when Thaw asks me what we do next.
It is a true sentence. It is also a sentence that lets me stop standing here.
Behind me, Thaw has not spoken. The bond is wide open and what is in it is — not management.
Not soothe. He is letting me have this. He is letting me have the seconds where I am not a queen and I am not a stabilizer where I am a woman who has just learned the Syndicate started a child without her, and he is standing behind me with his hand at the small of my back.
I do not deserve him.
That is the next thought and it lands harder than the child thought.
I do not deserve him. I do not deserve any of them.
They have been weapons in a program for thirty years.
We are all of us in this room standing on a foundation a third party poured, and the third party is going to keep pouring foundation for twenty-three other women and a child I have not met, and what am I supposed to do with that.
I do not get to be in love. I do not get to be a mate.
I do not get to be a queen. The categories are all wrong because they were built by the program that built me and the men I am bonded to and the only honest answer to the question is —
Thaw’s hand at my back closes.
He has read the spiral and he has decided he is done letting it run, and what comes through the bond is one clear short sentence in his voice, not out loud, the bond carrying it.
Stop.
I stop.
I am still cold. I am still flat. The shake has not come back. But the, I do not deserve him, thought has been — cut. Set aside. The pack does not negotiate with that thought and Thaw has just told me through the line that we are not going to.
I take a breath.
The child is real. The mother is real. The other twenty-three are real.
The men around me are real. The bond is real.
The patch is real. All of it is real and none of it is fair and the parts of it that are not fair do not get to be the part I solve right now in a Syndicate file room with a fire alarm about to go off and a Crull-sized orc in the doorway with an eye on the hall.
I will pick the unfair part up later. Not now. Now I am in a building I am going to burn.
I straighten up.
"Jen," Thaw says. Quiet. He has read every second of the rupture through the bond. He is not asking. He is naming.
"I am okay."
"You are not okay."
"I am not okay. I am also not going to be okay in this building. We finish the building. Then I am not okay."
I hand him the file.
He reads the front. He reads the photocopy. His face goes the color of a man who has just understood something his body has been bracing for and the bracing was not enough.
"Crull," he says. Quiet.
"Yes."
"Get the other files. Every name in the active folder. We take them all."
"Yes."
"Dean."
"Already running."
"Harek. Fen. Status."
The earpiece. North clear. Twelve staff secured. Two armed staff down.
"Bring them. We are taking everything in this office and burning the building on the way out."
Thaw is at my elbow. The bond is wide open.
"Stay with me," he says. "We will take every file. We will find her. We will find all of them. Stay with me."
I look up at him.
I look at the file in my hand. At Hollens, M. At the photo of a woman with a freckle pattern across her nose.
The patch on my chest is pulling toward something, and the something is not in this room — the something is somewhere outside the building, somewhere the patch can feel, somewhere a woman is pregnant with biology that is half mine.
"Take everything," I say. My voice is not mine. "Burn the building. Get me out."