Chapter 25
Chapter twenty-five
Jen
Dean puts the laptop down on the registry and says the thing he's been carrying up the drive.
"Sarah Klein's dead."
The kitchen stops. Crull's hands go still in the dough. Daron looks up from the map.
"Three weeks ago. Maybe four." Dean doesn't sit down. "Reno PD found a body in a rental east of the city in April and it's been sitting in a county system since, and I only found it because I stopped looking for Sarah Klein and started looking for Jane Does." A breath. "It's her."
Nobody says anything.
"I told you." He's looking at me. "At the rest stop, with the coffee. I said we don't have her, we have where she is, and that's not the same as gone." His jaw works once. "It was the same as gone. It had already been the same as gone for a week when I said it."
"Dean."
"I want it read out. Not filed." He puts two fingers on the page. "Sarah Klein. Twenty-nine. Lab tech, Reno. We knew her name for eleven days."
So I read it. All of it. Daron gets up and stands behind his brother's chair and puts a hand on the back of his neck and leaves it there.
Crull washes the dough off his hands and comes and stands at the table and doesn't say a word, because there isn't one, and standing there is the whole thing he does.
Thaw crosses her name off.
"That's two," he says.
Two. Mary Wylie and Sarah Klein.
I'd have carried that alone a month ago.
I'd have taken it up to a room and not come down and let everybody in this house feel it through the floor and called that carrying my own weight.
Harek sat across this table three weeks ago and told me the pack was the everything, and I said I'd stop, and stopping looks like this.
The four of them around the table. Me not the only one who knows.
It doesn't hurt less.
It just isn't mine by myself.
Twenty-three names came out of Linden's cabinet.
One of them is mine.
Fifteen of them have been saved. Two of them here — Mara at the table with her camera, Janet upstairs.
More went to their own people, the way Ana Choi went to a porch light in Montana at four in the morning and a sister who was running down the steps before the truck stopped.
Two took the file we gave them and walked and told us not to follow, and we haven't.
Two dead.
Two unaccounted. Names on a page. No location, no status, no contact, nothing to work with but the fact that nobody's found their bodies either.
The work isn't done.
I close the registry.
Out the window, Crull's got a string line across the flat part of the yard and the twins are arguing over it, and there's a pallet of lumber where the equipment lean-to used to be.
Daron catches me looking.
"It's a bunkhouse," he says.
Thaw comes in off the porch at noon.
"They're ready."
I go out.
Reyes is already standing beside the work truck with the duffel we'd packed for him at his feet.
Vance sits in the passenger seat with one bag on her lap and Thaw's coat around her shoulders.
Weeks in the basement, brought up every morning by Crull and Harek to turn Linden's drives into something we could use.
Madison's already on the step.
She's got Gabi against her shoulder in a blanket, and she's been standing there since before I came out. I don't know how long.
I stop where I am.
Because this isn't mine.
"Madison." She doesn't look at me. She's looking at the truck. "I know," she says. Vance looks up at her from the seat.
"Nobody here asked me to spare you. They asked me what I wanted to do with you. This is what I decided."
"Thank you."
"You're not protected. You're not ours."
"I know."
"The people who built that program would kill you in a heartbeat."
"Yes."
Silence.
Vance's eyes drift to the blanket.
"Don't," Madison says.
Vance looks back at her.
"You get to live. You don't get her. You told me the truth every morning when I came down there with my phone.
That's the only reason you're in that seat and not in the ground next to the woman who trained you.
" She adjusts the blanket over Gabi's head, slow enough that Vance can watch every movement.
"So you get to live. You don't get to know her. "
Vance nods once.
Harek is waiting beside the truck with two capped syringes.
Neither of them asks.
Reyes holds out his arm first.
Vance watches him for a second, then offers hers.
"You'll sleep through the drive," Harek says.
The injections are quick.
Crull settles a dark canvas hood over Reyes's head, then another over Vance's.
The passenger door closes.
Thaw drives the truck down the drive.
Madison stands on the step until the sound is gone.
***
Gabi wakes up in the afternoon.
Madison's asleep — she sleeps when Gabi sleeps, which is most of the day — so I lift her out of the bassinet by the window and take her across the hall and sit on the bed with her.
Three weeks. Heavier than last week. The pale skin the same, the shadow under it the same, the small claws at her fingertips unchanged. Soft. Half-formed. There.
The dark eyes look bigger than they did. That might just be that she's more awake.
She looks at me.
She's looked at me like this since a week old. Harek thinks it's the hybrid biology. Madison thinks it's what she is.
I shift her across my lap, her head in my hand.
"Hello," I say.
She blinks. Her hand comes up and finds my finger and closes on it, the soft half-claws curling in against my skin, holding on — the grip of something that has decided the finger is hers now. This miraculous little hand grips me like it's the most ordinary thing in the world.
Then the hand opens.
The fingers uncurl off mine and the palm turns up toward the ceiling, and for a second it's nothing. An open baby hand in the afternoon light.
Something gathers under the skin.
A mark surfaces in the center of her palm. Small. Dark. The size of a dime. It deepens once — everything in it going darker at the same time — and then it sinks back down and the palm is bare.
She closes her hand. She blinks at me.
I don't move.
The place under my ribs warms. It isn't Fen. Fen sits at my sternum and burns; this sits lower and does something else, and it's been there since the night she came, and I don't have a word for it. Not a thread. Not a mate-bond.
Out on the porch I feel Fen's head come up. The patch at my sternum spikes when hers surfaces and his line answers it a half-second behind.
He doesn't come in.
He waits.
In the kitchen Crull turns from the counter toward the back of the house, registers it, and goes back to the bread.
I sit with her a long time. She doesn't open her hand again. The mark doesn't come back.
I hold her and let her look at me until she falls asleep with my finger still caught in her fist.
I lay her in the bassinet. Madison doesn't wake. I touch the back of her head once with two fingers and go out and close the door.
Fen's on the step with a book shut on his thigh.
"She marked," I say. "The palm. You felt it."
"Yes." He nods.
"I wonder what she’s going to be."
Fen smiles.
"You're not afraid."
"No."
He moves over. I sit down next to him and he puts his arm around me. The light's going gold at the edge of the trees. Down in the yard Crull's got the string line staked and the twins have stopped arguing and started digging.
Thaw won't be back till dark.
The mark at my sternum is warm and the place under my ribs is warm and I sit on the step in the sun with Fen's arm around me and let both of them be.