10. Chapter 10
Chapter ten
Jen
The trucks pull off the highway onto a gravel road at one in the afternoon. The farther we get from the highway, the quieter Daron becomes. His ice-blue eyes never leave the road.
Madison is awake again, watching the trees.
"Almost there," Daron says.
The gravel opens into a clearing I know.
The cabin sits at the back of it — hand-built logs, a stone foundation, a low roof gone the gray-green of the trees around it.
A barn thirty yards to the left. A ridge behind.
We planned Theresa at the table. We left a man tied up in the cellar when we drove out. We are coming back to both.
Daron rolls us into the barn. The second truck pulls in behind us. Dean is out before the engine dies, walking the front of the clearing, eyes up, doing the sight-line check the twins do every time we arrive somewhere — even here, even at their own place.
"Clear," Dean says into the comm. Crull goes to check on the prisoner.
“Cellar held, Reyes is still locked up.”
"Copy," Daron says. He turns in the seat. Looks at me, then Madison, then back at me.
Madison studies the cabin through the windshield.
"It looks normal," she says.
"That's the point."
"Is it yours?"
"The twins'. They built it years ago. We've been using it as a safe house."
She nods.
"Okay."
I get her out of the back seat. She leans on me and we cross the clearing slow because she has not been out of a bed much in the last few weeks.
Thaw has the door open before we reach it.
Inside is dim and clean and smells like a place lived in.
Crull closes the cellar door behind him as we come in.
Harek is already in the hallway, opening doors. He picks one.
"Back room," he says. "Smallest bed, but warmest wall — the stove backs onto it. She needs the heat." He has a pitcher of water in one hand and a glass in the other.
I walk Madison down to it. A small room, a single bed, a window on the trees. Harek sets the water on the nightstand and goes back out.
"This is yours for as long as you want it," I say.
Madison sits on the edge of the bed. Breathes out. Puts her hand on her stomach.
I hesitate.
"Vance is here."
Madison's eyes snap to mine.
"You brought her?"
"She knows more about the protocol than anyone alive. She's our prisoner now. She doesn't come near you unless you want her to, and she doesn't touch you without your permission."
Madison's jaw sets.
"Bring her."
Crull brings Vance into the room. Her wrists are zip-tied in front of her. One of his hands stays locked around her arm.
Dean takes the doorway. I stay between Vance and the bed. The voice sits quiet at the back of my throat. Available.
Vance reads the room in a single glance—the guards, me, Madison on the bed—and settles into the detached professionalism she hides behind.
"I'll need my hands."
"Watch yourself," I say. "Treat her with respect. Tell her before you touch her. If she says stop, you stop."
Vance's eyes flick to mine.
"Understood."
She takes Madison's pulse and her pressure and listens low on her belly with a scope, narrating every move before she makes it, because I told her to and because she can feel what is waiting if she doesn't. When she straightens, the numbers come flat.
"Blood pressure is elevated. Not yet dangerous. Fetal heart rate remains elevated. The acceleration is running." She looks at Madison, not at me. "On this clock you deliver in four days."
"And if I want off it," Madison says.
Vance goes still.
"Then we give her the reversal," I say.
"I want it," Madison says.
Nobody moves. Crull's hand tightens once on Vance's arm.
"Before you decide," I say. "Vance. Tell her what it does, and what you tested it on. All of it."
Vance doesn't soften it. "It stops the cascade. It doesn't end the pregnancy — it drops you back onto the hybrid protocol's rate. Six weeks. You've carried about three. You'd have roughly three weeks left. And the pain stops. The cascade is what's hurting you."
"Then I want it."
"You didn't ask what it's been tested on."
Madison stops.
"Cells," Vance says. "In the lab. That's all.
It's never been in an animal, and it's never been in a woman.
On the bench it does exactly what it's supposed to — the cascade shuts off, the cells go back to the protocol rate.
But a dish isn't a body. I can't tell you what it does inside a living person, because it's never been inside one. You'd be the first."
Madison takes it without flinching. She is a person whose job is telling small scared people the truth.
"So putting it in me might kill me."
"It might."
"And if I do nothing — four days, and whether I come out the other side is a coin you can't call either."
"Yes."
Madison looks at her own hands a long moment. Then at me.
"I want both of you in here. You, and him. He said the rest was mine. I'm holding him to it."
I send Dean for Fen.
He comes in and takes the wall, hands flat against it, the way he sat in the truck. He looks at Madison's face.
"You said the rest was mine," she says.
His jaw works. "Yes."
"I'm going to take the reversal."
I feel it go through him. He gives her the only word he can carry.
"Yours."
Madison turns to Vance. "Do it."
Vance draws the compound from the case Dean sets on the nightstand. She holds the syringe up so I can see the line, says the dose out loud, says where it goes and why. Crull is at her shoulder. I am close enough that the voice would land before she finished a wrong move.
She finds the vein in Madison's arm. "Sharp," she says, and pushes it.
Then nothing.
Vance has two fingers on Madison's pulse and her eyes on her watch. Nobody in the room moves. The seconds stretch long enough that the voice starts climbing my throat — useless, because there is nothing here to command.
Then the tension goes out of her.
I watch it leave her face — her color going from bright to plain pale, her breath catching and then lengthening. Her hand stays on her stomach.
Madison takes another breath. Then another. Vance keeps her fingers on the pulse.
"She should be back on the protocol rate. About three weeks now — if she comes through it. I'll need to watch her through the night."
"You'll watch her under guard," I say. "Same terms. Every hour."
"Understood."
Beside me Fen has not moved off the wall, and the thread between us is so tight it hums, because what just changed in that room is half his.
Madison's eyes are already closing — the drug, or the exhaustion, or both.
"Thank you," she says, to the room, to none of us in particular. "For letting it be mine."
Fen pushes off the wall. He does not come toward her. He goes to the door, and there he stops and looks back at her.
Nobody ever asked him. Every needle, every extraction, every door that locked—nobody ever once let it be his to decide. He made sure this one was hers.
He dips his head once, and he's gone.