20. Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
Jen
"Put it down."
He doesn't. He should — everyone does, the driver on the interstate did, the guard in the corridor twenty feet back did — and he doesn't. The units in his ears. Whatever they are, they're working.
"Put it down."
Nothing.
I don't get to do anything else.
Crull's already moving — not away, across, the whole mass of him folding into the space between me and the gun before the muzzle finishes settling, and I understand in the half-second it takes that there was never a moment I could have stopped this, because he didn't wait for me to try. He protects.
The round that was aimed at my chest opens his shoulder instead.
He falls.
And my whole world goes down to one thing.
His blood on the floor. That's all there is. The cabinet is gone. The list I came two floors up for is gone. Linden against the doorframe is gone. The white room, the fluorescent, the chemical air — all of it gone. There is Crull, down, red spreading under him.
The slate doesn't climb this time. It floods. All of me, between one breath and the next and I don't decide it because the woman isn't here anymore. Only the thing that protects what's hers.
Claws.
The units in his ears were built for a voice. I don't need a voice.
It comes in flashes and they don't come in order and I don't keep all of them.
His hand still on the gun.
Mine.
The gun on the floor.
His hand off it.
A sound that isn't a shot.
Red where there was white.
I'm on my knees next to Crull with no memory of crossing back, my hands wet to the wrist, and the slate is already draining off my skin the way water goes out of a tub, arms first, then the rest, the room coming up around me again in fluorescent and chemical and the shape of what I did against the far wall that I don't look at.
"Crull —"
His eyes are open. He gets a breath and holds it and I watch him lose the fight to hide it for exactly one second — the pain goes all the way across his face, his jaw clenching around a sound he won't make — and then he has it packed down under, Crull again.
"Get behind me," he says. Bleeding, graying, still turning his body to shield me from the room.
"Crull, oh my god. Let me see it."
The pain's coming down the bond so total my own shoulder's gone numb. I press my hand to the wound and he grunts, and I hold it there.
And behind the pain, the rest of bonds fire all at once, and I feel every one.
Dean somewhere east, going white with it.
Daron already running. Harek's mind snapping into triage from wherever he is.
Thaw at the truck feeling it land and bending the whole op around it in a heartbeat: get him out.
And Fen — the instant the round hit, crossing ground toward the me.
Linden is on the floor against the doorframe where she went down when I attacked. Her eyes are open. She watched all of it. Crull fold around me. What I became. What I did to the man with the earpieces.
She isn't afraid. She isn't gloating. She looks at the far wall, then at me, her head tipped, and she’s analyzing all of it.
"There it is," she says. Not to me. To the result on the floor.
"We spent forty years building a perfect hybrid.
" Her eyes go over what's left of the enforcer, over my hands.
"And you were out there all along. Very violent when protective instincts triggered. You would’ve never done that on command.
" Something settles in her face, admiring and bitter in the same breath.
"We found the exact ingredients. Still couldn’t make them work. "
"Stop talking."
She doesn't.
"Almost perfect," she says, quiet, and lets her head rest back against the frame. Grading it. Then her eyes sharpen and go somewhere — inward, calculating.
I hear Fen at the doorway and Linden continues.
"The carrier's still viable," she says. "Hollens.
The child's what — a few days out? Or was she already born?
" She isn't asking me. She's asking the file in her head.
"Yours and his. The uncontrollable thing and the subject we couldn't break.
" Something comes into her voice that's almost longing, and that's the part that turns my stomach, because it's real.
"I would have given the rest of my life to see what that child is.
Whether it takes. Whether you can order it to do anything.
" Her eyes come back to my face, lit. "That child is the most valuable unanswered question on the continent now.
" A small, terrible tilt of her head. "You didn't end anything here.
You made something they'll spend the next forty years trying to open. "
I don't answer her. My hand's tightened on Crull's wound without my telling it to, and the room's gone cold.
Fen grunts.
The shift's up in him from the threat, dark down his arms, eyes gone red-and-gold. His eyes go to Crull on the floor with my hand packed to his shoulder. To the far wall, and what's against it. To me.
They stop on me. Recognition. The same thing Thaw said on the riverbank, without a word, down the line.
"Crull," he says, and crosses to him, drops to his other side.
Linden watches Fen come, her eyes tracking him with the same clinical hunger, something else banking under it seeing him close.
"Vex," she says softly. "That one should not be standing on his own feet. We took him apart twice." Almost to herself.
Fen doesn't give her his eyes. I watch him keep them off her on purpose — a door held shut — because if he looks at her now, over Crull's blood, it happens now, and there's a bleeding man.
"The cabinet," he says to me. Level. "We don't have long."
The drives are still in there. The list. All of it — the enforcer never got to burn it.
I get Linden up off the floor and over to the reader and press her hand to it. The cabinet opens. Hard drives racked unlabeled. I pull a bag from my jacket and slot each one and don't let my hands shake until they're all in and it's slung across me.
I set her back down. She lets me, watching with that tilted calm.
"Can you command your mates?," she asks. "Have you tried it yet?"
I don't spend a word on her.
Crull's up — Fen got him standing while I worked the cabinet, the shoulder packed, gray but on his feet, leaning into Fen's side.
"Get him to the truck," I tell Fen. "I've got the drives. Go."
He doesn't move.
He's looking at her now. He's let himself, finally — the door he kept shut the whole time, open now, because Crull's standing and the bag's on my body.
Fen's dark eyes are on Linden on the floor, and the thing in his face isn't the shift.
It's the man underneath it, gone very quiet and very certain.
Crull feels it through him. He straightens off Fen's side, taking his own weight, freeing him. "I can stand," Crull says, low, and sets his good shoulder to the frame, and holds himself up so Fen doesn't have to.
Nobody says what it is. Everybody in the room knows.
She ran the program that took him apart. She ran it for years. She just put her clinical hunger on his unborn daughter and named the child a target the world will hunt. And we are not walking out of this building and leaving her alive to do one more day of it.
I want it. My hands are already red — I'd do it myself and not lose a night's sleep, for Crull, for the baby.
I look at Fen instead.
I don't say a word. I step back, and I let a free man choose.
Linden watches him come. She doesn't beg. To the last she's studying it — the subject she caged, the asset she filed, standing up out of all of it on his own feet and choosing, by himself, what happens to her. Her eyes flick to me once.
"You won't even take my death," she says to me. Wondering. The last data point. "You could. You want to. And you'll hand it to him instead." Almost a smile. "We really couldn't have built you. Not in a hundred years."
Then she looks up at Fen, and whatever she sees there, she stops.
"Subject Vex," she says. Quiet. Not cruel. Reading the name off the oldest file she has.
"Fen," he says.
It's the only word he gives her. It's the whole of it.
I don't look away. With one swipe, Fen cuts her jugular.
The room goes quiet again. Fen stands over it a moment, breathing, the shift nowhere in him now, just the man. Then he turns from her and comes back and gets under Crull's arm, and Crull leans into him, and the two of them are steady against each other.
"We go," Fen says.
Crull between us, Fen taking his weight, the bag at my hip, and nothing alive behind us. Fen shoulders the broken service door and we step into the gravel and the cold clean air after the chemical inside.
Thaw's at the truck in the trees, engine running.
Harek has Crull on the tailgate before I've crossed the gravel, hands already moving — pressure.
The twins come in from the east with the cold-storage cases, Daron first, Dean a step behind with his jaw wrecked from a fear that hasn't finished leaving him.
"Through and clean," Harek says. "He'll keep."
Crull's on the tailgate, the slate gone ashen at his mouth, the round through his shoulder still leaking dark down his arm.
"Nothing wrong with me," he says.
There's a hole through his shoulder.
Dean laughs — once, wet, cracked wide open — and it goes around the field like a thing let loose, every line catching it at once, because it's the first sound any of us has made since ending Linden.
Fen's at my back and hasn't moved off it. I turn into him, the bag between us, my hands still red where they fist in his shirt.
"You stepped back," he says. "Up there. You let me have her."
"She was yours."
His arms tighten, and for a moment he doesn't say anything, and I feel the thing move down the line that he doesn't have the words for out loud. He needed that.
Thaw's got the back door open. "Get him in. Harek rides with him. We roll."
I climb in beside Crull and take his good hand, and Fen shuts us in, and the truck pulls out of the trees. Behind us the building stands dark against the moonless sky, every window black now, the forty-year study closed.