Chapter eight
Jen
The patch under my sternum is pulling me back into the building. Down. Through the concrete to the level below.
Madison is asleep in the work truck. Daron is behind the wheel, engine running. I am at the south door with Thaw, Fen, and Harek.
"It's pulling down," I say looking at Thaw.
"I've felt it through you." The gold eyes find mine. "What is it?"
"I don't know. Vance had codes for a room down there. She didn't say what was in it."
"Then we find out."
Thaw keys the radio at his shoulder. "Daron. Hold. We're going back in. Give us ten minutes."
"Copy."
"Crull, Dean. Status."
Dean, in my ear. "Reversal secured. Loading dock in five."
"Vance leaves first," I say. "I want her out before we come up."
"Got it."
Thaw opens the south door. We go in.
The stairwell drops one flight and the cold comes up to meet us. By the basement landing I can see my breath. Frost rims the conduit on the wall, thin and white. The light down here is colder.
A placard at the bottom of the stairs, stenciled: CRYO / RECORDS / PROCESSING.
We come out into a corridor. White walls. Sealed paint. The wipe-down kind. Poured floor with a drain every twenty feet, and the drains have been used.
A man is moving fast away from a vault door at the far end — backpack half-slung, lab coat open, a lanyard swinging at his neck with a key on it. Headed for the stairs. For the way we came in.
He hears us and looks over.
He takes in Thaw with the patterning still lit at his throat, Fen with the dark lines down his neck, Harek's bulk filling the corridor behind me — and his hand goes for the wall. A red panic plate, palm height, just a few feet from him.
The voice is up before he reaches it.
"Stop."
His hand stops an inch off the plate.
I can read every part of him give out at once — pupils blown, the lanyard shaking against his chest, the breath gone shallow. He is wide open, and the voice has all of him.
A few hours ago this took everything I had. Now I barely spend anything.
"Step back from the wall."
He steps back.
"The key on your lanyard. Give it to me."
He lifts the lanyard over his head and holds it out. I take the key.
"Drop the bag. Go up the stairs. Out the south door. A hundred yards into the trees, sit down, and stay there until someone finds you."
He walks past Thaw, past Harek, up the stairs, gone.
Thaw watches the door swing shut behind him. "That used to cost you."
"Not anymore."
We keep moving.
The vault door at the end is metal, industrial, six feet of it, a keypad with a red light. I key in the code Dean pulled off Vance. Eight, four, seven, seven, one, two.
The light goes green. The door unseals — half hiss, half mechanism — and the air that rolls out is colder than the corridor by thirty degrees.
The patch spikes.
Harek sets his back to the corridor and takes the door. Thaw goes in first. Fen comes in behind me.
I know this room.
Well not this one exactly. The one at Theresa — white tile, steel shelves, the compressor hum you feel in your teeth, drawers with women's names on them.
I stood in that one a few hours ago and opened a drawer with my own name on it and pulled out what was inside, and I told myself I had taken it back.
This one is bigger.
Floor to ceiling down both walls, refrigerated cabinets, glass-fronted, forty-eight on the left and forty-eight on the right.
Behind the glass, racks of vials, hundreds to a rack, and frost has bloomed white along the seam of every door, so the labels read like they are under ice.
The compressors run under everything, low, a sound I feel in my back teeth.
The cabinets at the far end are older. Yellowed paint, older glass.
I took six vials out of a room like this before dawn and put them in my coat and told myself it was done. It wasn't.
There is a workstation on the center wall. A terminal, a printer, a rolling desk stacked with paper. The directory is right there on the desk, printed, the same letterhead as Madison's chart.
Thaw reads over my shoulder.
Women first. Subject numbers from the low hundreds up into the seven hundreds. Eggs, embryos, processed material. Forty years of registry women, most of them failures, a few of them not.
My line is in there. Griggson, Jennifer L. Subject Forty-Seven. There is more of me on this list than I carried out of Theresa.
I read past it.
Two lines up, Hollens, Madison. Cohort B-7. My line, Madison's line, the men's lines — every one of us in this room, catalogued, before any of us knew the others were alive.
Then the men. They are at the bottom of the list, and they go back years.
Subject Fen. 11/14/23 to present. Subject Thaw. 06/08/20 to present. Subject Crull. 03/22/21 to present. Subject Harek. 08/04/19 to present.
Present.
Every one of them.
They were still drawing it before our escape.
They weren't experiments. That is the word I keep reaching for and it is the wrong word. Experiments end. These are line items. And nobody ever meant it to stop.
Harek since two thousand nineteen.
I glance back at him. He is at the door, watching the corridor, and his hand has closed at his side, slow, until the claws are in his own palm. He does not seem to know he is doing it.
Thaw takes the directory off the desk. He is looking at his own line.
"Fucking years."
Then nothing, for a while.
"June." Flat. "I'd been running with them two years by then. I thought I had a contract."
He sets the paper down. Flattens his palm on it like he can hold it still.
"They paid me to run their operations." A breath. "And drew this off me the whole time. Both sides of the ledger. Billed the missions, kept the rest."
His jaw works once.
"Crull doesn't know yet."
Crull is out at the loading dock with Vance and the reversal, and his line is on this list too, three up from Thaw's. I am not putting it over the radio. He gets to hear it from one of us, out of this building, with room to put his fist through something that isn't a wall we still need.
"He will when we tell him," I say.
Thaw turns to the cabinet nearest us. R-13. His.
"Open it."
"Why?"
"I want to see what they have."
I open it. The interior light comes up. Shelves by year, 2019 at the bottom, each year its own rack of finger-length vials. He takes it in and touches nothing.
"Hundred-some of me in one cabinet," he says. "And they still sent me out between."
I close it.
Fen is at the far wall.
He has gone small again — wings tight, the lines down his neck dark and still.
His cabinet is racked like the rest. Oldest at the back, newest at the front — three vials drawn in the last six weeks, before we pulled him out of the cell at the breach. Years of him, sorted front to back by date, like stock that came in on a schedule.
Because it did.
He puts his palm flat on the glass. The air around him flexes once, there and gone. He holds his hand there. His print fogs the glass, right over the three vials at the front.
He takes his hand away. He doesn't say anything.
We can't carry all of this. Not the volume—hundreds of racks, ninety-six cabinets, forty years. We can carry paper. The directory. The records off the desk.
The rest, I'm going to burn.
An Emergency Thermal Purge panel is mounted on the back wall behind a locked metal cover.
Instructions are bolted beside it in plain black lettering.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY – ARCHIVE DESTRUCTION PROTOCOL
The key from the man in the corridor fits. I enter the facility code Vance gave Dean.
THERMAL PURGE AUTHORIZED.
The system asks for a countdown. Five minutes by default. I cut it to thirty seconds.
Thaw hugs the records against his chest—the directory, a binder of quarterly reports.
He has what matters.
I look at Fen. He's still standing at the cabinet with his name, the three vials lined up in front of him.
"Say the word."
His eyes linger on the cabinet. Then they lift to mine.
"Burn it."
Rough. But clear.
I press Enter.
A red warning light flashes over the vault door.
THERMAL PURGE INITIATED.
The automated countdown begins. A woman's voice. Emotionless.
"Thirty."
"Twenty-nine."
"Twenty-eight."
Beneath it, the constant compressor hum I've felt in my teeth since we walked in sputters, catches, then dies.
The air loses its chill almost immediately. Without the cooling system, the archive will become an oven.
Paper.
Plastic.
Blood.
Samples.
Forty years.
Gone.
"Out," Thaw says.
We move. Harek off the wall to take the stairs first, Thaw behind him with the records, me with the directory, Fen at my back. Red light strobing on the landing.
One flight up. The south door. We push out into the bright cold.
Daron is at the wheel. Madison has not moved. Dean, in my ear: "Vance in the prisoner truck. Loading dock clear. Rolling to rendezvous."
Thaw lays the records on the back floorboard, the directory on top. "Let’s go," he says.
Fen has not gotten in. He faces the trees, and the sky beyond them.
I can feel it. The adrenaline. The restless pull under his skin.
"Go fly," I tell him.
My hand settles against my chest.
"I can feel you from here."
His eyes meet mine.
"Just stay close."
He nods. Then he turns toward the tree line and shifts—wings spreading, and he's airborne.
Harek takes the front. I get in the back. Daron pulls out.
Behind us, deep beneath a white building on the side of the mountain, the thermal purge is doing exactly what it was built to do. Forty years of stolen lives.
Burned into ash before anyone can use them again.
I watch the mirror until Camille is gone in the trees.
Above the tree line, a dark shape banks south and stays with us.