Chapter 25
Chapter twenty-five
Jen
The minute we start the extraction back to the loading bay, the patch under my chest lunges — not pulls, lunges, a hard sudden jerk toward a wing of the building I have not been in — and my body answers before my brain catches up.
I take three steps down a side hallway before Thaw realizes I am not at his hip anymore.
He is shouting. Crull is turning. Harek and Fen are on the other side of the building moving toward the loading bay with the file duffel.
Dean is at the breach point on overwatch.
I am in a Syndicate hallway alone for the first time since I came out of the cell, and the patch is dragging me toward a door at the end of it.
I get to the door.
It is a cold-storage room. I can tell by the change in the air pressure when I open it — the thunk of an industrial fridge seal, the wave of refrigerated air hitting my face, the hum of compressors.
The room is white-tile and steel-shelved and it is full of small refrigerated drawers, the kind a biology lab uses.
Each drawer has a label. The labels are women's names and file numbers.
The drawer the patch is pulling me to is labeled GRIGGSON, J. — FILE 47 — DONOR ACTIVE — Q1 RETRIEVAL.
Me.
It is the cellular material they took out of me in the lab. It is in a drawer in this building. I am standing in front of it with my hand reaching for the drawer pull before I have decided what I want to do with it.
That is when another door at the far end of the cold-storage room opens and two men come through it.
They are not staff. They are not lab. They are two armed Syndicate retrieval agents in tactical gear with rifles up.
One of the rifles comes up. Trank, by the shape of the barrel.
The other one says, "Subject 47. Hold position."
He does not say Jen. He does not say Miss Griggson.
He says Subject 47 the way you say a sample code.
He is reading me the way the Syndicate has been reading me my whole life without my knowing — as a file number, as a body in a drawer with a label, as the thing they had in a vial and now have in a hallway.
My body decides something before I do.
The patch on my chest blooms.
The dark shape under my skin — the thing that has been building for three weeks — moves.
Out. Up. Through. The five lines that map to my five sealed threads and the sixth line that aims at Fen all go bright at once, and the bright is not under my skin anymore, the bright is on my skin, the bright is coming through me.
My hands change first.
The slate-gray nails come the rest of the way to claws. Black, curved, sharp at the points. The skin of my forearms goes slate-gray under the surface to the elbow.
My teeth ache. The canines push against the inside of my upper lip, longer, sharp. My mouth tastes like iron.
Pressure builds in my skull.
Heat. Then release.
The retrieval agent's eyes go wide.
I reach up automatically.
Two small obsidian horns have sprouted from the top of my head, curving back. Smooth under my fingers. Obsidian-black. Three inches, maybe four.
I lower my hand.
The vision in my left eye does something — a doubling, then a sharpening, then the room is brighter than it should be in the cold-light of the fridge bulbs.
The patch on my chest is hot, radiating heat down through my sternum and out into the bonds, and through the bonds I feel the pack registering it in real time — Thaw right outside the cold room struggling with the door, yelling at Dean to hurry, Crull turning fast, Harek at the loading bay going still, Fen and Daron feeling it and answering.
I am not afraid. I am interested. I am cornered in a Syndicate cold-storage room with two armed men with tranks and a drawer with my own genetic material in it, and the part of my body that has spent three weeks asking what am I has just decided to show me.
The agent fires.
The trank dart leaves the rifle with a small soft spit.
I see it coming.
I do not duck. I do not move sideways. I lift my left hand and the dart hits my palm and stops — does not bury, does not penetrate, stops against the slate-skin of my hand the way a stone stops on rock. The needle bends. The dart drops to the tile.
The agent stares at his rifle.
The second agent's trigger is twitching. The bonds are screaming and the agent with the twitching trigger has maybe two seconds before he decides to fire the second dart.
I open my mouth.
What comes out of it is not my voice.
It is — layered. My voice, and underneath it, the down register I used on Fen, and underneath that, a third register I have not used before, lower, slower, a vibration in my sternum that comes up through my throat and out of me as a sound that has weight in the air.
I feel it land in the room. I feel it hit the two agents the way a wave hits a body.
The word is one word.
"Stop."
Both rifles drop.
Not lowered. Dropped. The two agents' hands open at the same time and the rifles hit the white tile with a clatter and the two men go down to their knees on the floor of a Syndicate cold-storage room and they put their hands on the back of their heads without anybody telling them to.
I have not moved.
The closer agent is looking up at me, and the look in his face is the look I have seen on dogs in my yard at animal control when the dog has just realized the thing in the room is not what they came in expecting.
His eyes find the top of my head. I watch the moment his brain registers what is there.
Thaw and Dean have opened the door of the cold-storage room — I hear the door — and Crull is behind him, and Harek, Fen and Daron are coming to, and all six of them arrive in the cold-storage room to find me standing with my back to a drawer labeled with my own name, two Syndicate retrieval agents on their knees in front of me, my hands black-clawed and slate-skinned, and two obsidian horns curving back from the top of my head.
They stop.
All six of them. At once.
They are looking at the horns first. I see the moment their eyes find the top of my head and register what is there.
Thaw's breath catches. Crull's eyes widen. Harek goes absolutely still. Daron breathes out a quiet curse.
Dean is the first to speak. His voice is flat. "Well. That's new."
And Fen.
Fen comes through the door behind Harek, sees me, sees the agents on the floor, sees the horns, and his body stops moving.
The not-yet-thread lights. For one second I feel — through the line that is not yet sealed but is full — Fen recognizing me.
This. The slate-skinned, black-clawed, horn-crowned this.
He has seen this before. He has seen this in his own body, and he is no longer the only one.
He drops to his knees.
Not the way the agents dropped. They dropped because the voice put them down. Fen drops willingly. He goes from standing to kneeling in one slow controlled motion and his head tips forward and his hands come palm-up on his thighs.
His body says yours. The not-yet-thread carries it.
The cold-storage room is silent.
My claws are still out. The patch under my skin is hot and the engine does not want to switch off.
I do not know how to switch it off.
That is the thing nobody told me. Coming up is one process.
Coming down is a different process. The body that has been building toward this does not have an off-switch I have located yet.
The claws are out and the slate is up and the layered-voice is sitting in my throat ready to be used again, and I do not have a procedure for putting it back.
I look at Thaw.
He is the first one of them I can look at without my chest splitting open.
"Thaw."
The layered voice is in it. I hear it. He hears it. He does not flinch.
"Yes."
"How?"
"Breathe with me. Same as the truck. Same as the corridor. We have done this before."
"Not this."
"Same principle. Your body did the thing. Now your body has to come down. Breathe with me. Slow. Deep. I am here."
I breathe.
The bond carries his rhythm down to mine. Slow, deep, the way he taught me on the truck floor when Fen was coming up the other side of a mesh wall. I match it. The patch on my chest eases a fraction. The heat drops a degree.
The claws come back.
Not all the way. They retract to the slate-gray length they were yesterday morning. The slate on my arms recedes but does not fully fade. The canines retract but I can feel them still longer than they were two days ago.
The horns do not.
I reach up. They are still there. Smaller than they were a minute ago — the heat that built them has eased, the pressure in my skull has gone — but they have not retracted.
Two small obsidian horns curving back from the top of my head.
The patch wanted to come up, and the patch is willing to ease most of itself back, but not the horns. The horns are staying.
I do not say anything about it.
The layered-voice in my throat — that one I will not be able to put away. I can feel it sitting in there now. It will come back when I call for it. The voice has arrived, and it is mine now whether I am ready for it or not.
I look at the agents on the floor.
They have not moved. They are still on their knees with their hands on the back of their heads, and the look on the faces I can see is fear, and not the fear of being captured, the fear of being near the thing they have been hunting.
"Crull," I say. The layered voice is still in it. I let it be there. "Truck. Now. Take them both."
"Yes."
Crull crosses the room. He picks up both rifles and hands them to Daron. He puts each agent over a shoulder because Crull is the orc and that is the kind of weight Crull carries without thinking — and he turns and goes back the way he came.
I look at the drawer.
GRIGGSON, J. — FILE 47 — DONOR ACTIVE — Q1 RETRIEVAL.
I cross the cold-storage room. I put my still-clawed hand on the drawer pull. I open it.
Inside are six vials. Small. Glass. Labeled with dates. My cellular material in six vials in a cold drawer in a Syndicate building.
I take the vials.
I put them in my coat.
I close the drawer.
I turn back to the pack.
Fen is still kneeling.
I cross the room and I stop in front of him. The not-yet-thread is full. I bend at the knees and I crouch in front of him until our faces are at the same level, and I lift his chin with two of my still-clawed fingers — slate-gray against the pale of his throat — and I make him look at me.
"Up," I say. Quiet. The layered voice is gentle now. "Fen. Up."
He does not move at first.
He is not refusing. He is resting in the kneeling.
It is the first place he has been allowed to be still in months.
His body has been on a climb from the cargo box to the campground to the trees to the office to this cold-storage room, and the kneeling has given him a kind of rest. He does not want to get up.
"Okay," I say. "Then stay."
I shift my hand from his chin to the side of his face. I lay my palm flat on his cheek. He leans into it the way Thaw's palm makes me lean into him. My slate-skin against his pale-skin. The not-yet-thread thrumming.
Behind me, Thaw says, very quiet, "Jen."
"Yes."
"We have four minutes. You can hold him later. We have to move."
I look at Fen. He nods. He stands.
He does not stand the way he stood before he knelt.
I cannot say what is different about it. It is not slower. It is not less. He is on his feet and he is steady. But there is a settled quality in the way his shoulders come up that was not there when he came through the doorway.
I take his hand.
His fingers close around mine. Not the desperate clutch from the campground. He is holding my hand on purpose, and he is keeping it. We cross the cold-storage room together and we exit through the door the pack came in by, and the pack folds around us as we go.
Site Theresa is on fire when we come out the loading bay door, and the orange of it is on the trees, and the trucks are running.
I get into the truck.