Chapter 4
Chapter four
Jen
We run.
The forest drops away under us in wet black slopes. Nobody slows down.
Dean is a shape between the trunks ahead of us, gone and then back, gone and then back. Daron stays somewhere behind us. Thaw keeps the pace brutal. Crull carries Fen over one shoulder like he weighs nothing.
My lungs burn. My legs burn. Nobody seems interested in stopping.
Then the trees thin and a road appears below us. And there is a truck parked on it. No headlights. No engine. No markings. Just a dented box truck sitting in the dark.
Dean reaches it first. By the time the rest of us hit the road, he already has a hand on the cargo door. The metal rattles as he rolls it upward and every one of us turns toward the trees.
Inside the truck is a dark square.
"In," Thaw says.
His eyes find mine.
"Jen first."
I walk to the back of the truck.
And stop.
Because the inside of the cargo box is not empty space.
The twins have built in here. There is a partition — steel mesh, heavy gauge, bolted into a frame that has been welded to the truck's own ribs — dividing the box into a larger forward section and a smaller one at the back.
There are restraint points. I can see them, dark rings set into the reinforced wall, the webbing straps coiled and clipped beside each one.
There is a low bench fitted along one side with a panel above it that hangs open, and inside the panel: trauma shears, rolled bandage, IV tubing, a rack of capped vials, sedation in labeled syringes.
My stomach goes straight down through the gravel.
It is a cell.
They built a cell. They built a smaller version of the thing I have been clawing my way out of for weeks, restraints and a medical tray and a steel mesh wall, and it is in the truck, it is the thing I am being told to climb into —
"We didn't know what we were pulling out," Dean says.
That is all he says at first.
"Two years," he goes on, and his voice is flat and even and costing him.
"Two years we thought he was dead. Then we found out he wasn't, and where he was, and what that place was.
And we did not know — " he stops, starts again — "we did not know if the thing we carried out of there would still be Thaw.
Or if it would be a feral that didn't know us.
Something we'd have to sedate, or chain, just to get it down a mountain without it killing us. "
He looks at the mesh. At the rings. At the coiled straps.
"So we built somewhere to put him." His jaw works. "Our own brother. We built a cell for our own brother and we drove it up here hoping the whole way we wouldn't need it."
Behind me, Thaw makes a sound. Quiet. I feel it more than hear it, through the bond — something cracking and resettling.
"And the rest of it." Dean's hand moves, takes in the medical panel, the bench.
"We didn't know who else was in there. What condition.
Whether they'd come out shot, or cut, or — used.
So we built a place to patch people up." His eyes come back to me.
"And we didn't know about you at all. But we knew whoever we pulled out of a place like that might come out of it with nothing. So."
He bends. Under the bench there is a duffel, and he pulls it open, and he takes out a folded stack and holds it out to me across the dark.
Clothes.
Real clothes. Soft, dark, folded — a sweatshirt, pants, socks rolled into a ball on top. The kind of thing a person owns. I have been in a torn hospital gown since a lab tech cut my running clothes off me in pieces.
I take the clothes.
My hands are not steady.
"It's not a cell," Dean says. "I need you to hear that. It was never a cell. It was the worst thing we were willing to be ready for."
I look at the mesh partition one more time. The rings. The straps.
And it is still a cell.
But the twins drove a cell up a mountain and the whole way up they wanted, more than anything, to drive it back down empty.
"Okay," I say.
We load fast after that.
Thaw lifts me up into the forward section and I pull the clothes on right there in the dark, in front of all of them. The sweatshirt is too big. It smells like nothing, like detergent, and I push my face into the fabric of it for one second and breathe.
Crull comes up into the box with Fen still over his shoulder.
Fen goes in the back section.
Because Fen is the most feral male in this truck — sedation thinning, claws out, a body that does not know us — and the small reinforced section behind the steel mesh is the only place in the world right now where he can ride down a mountain road without being a danger to the people who love him.
I hate it. I hate it with everything I have, and I cannot argue with a single part of it.
Crull carries him through the gap in the mesh and lays him down on a folded blanket. Crull does not strap him.
He looks at the restraint rings. He looks at Fen.
He does not use them.
He lays Fen down loose, on the blanket, and he stays crouched with one hand flat on Fen's chest and he says — to Thaw, not to me — "I ride back here."
"Crull —"
"I ride back here." The rumble does not stop under the words. "He does not wake up alone in a locked box. Not him. Not ever again."
Thaw looks at him for a long moment.
Then he nods, and Crull settles himself in the back section with Fen, on the wrong side of the mesh, in the cell, by choice.
The cargo door rolls down.
The dark goes total for a second before someone finds a battery lantern clipped to the wall and the box fills with low yellow light. Up front, I hear a cab door slam. The engine turns over. The truck lurches into motion.
Nobody says much.
After the alarms and the gunfire and the sprint through the forest, the quiet feels strange.
I sit between Thaw and Harek and let my head fall back against the wall.
The threads come up clearer in the stillness.
Thaw. Crull. Harek. The twins. And then the place where Fen should be.
Nothing. I try again. Fen is only a few feet away, separated from us by a steel mesh wall, but the place where his thread should be is cold and silent.
My eyes find him automatically.
He is still sprawled on the blanket in the reinforced compartment at the back of the truck. Crull sits against the wall beside him, one arm draped over a bent knee, the rumble in his chest low enough that I feel it more than hear it.
Then Fen moves. Not much. Just enough. His head lifts.
One hand closes against the blanket.
The hollow inside me clenches. Slowly, awkwardly, he pushes himself upright. For one second I think he is going to look around. Think he is going to see us.
Instead he stands. And starts pacing.
The compartment is too small. Three steps one way. Turn. Three steps back.
Turn.
The truck rocks beneath him. He keeps moving. Head down. Shoulders tight.
Every pass brings him back in front of Crull. Every pass takes him away again. Crull never reaches for him. Never tries to stop him.
He just stays there. A fixed point. A place to return to.
"He's not okay."
The words leave me before I mean to say them.
Thaw's hand settles on the back of my neck.
"No."
Not cruel. Just true. I watch Fen turn again. The lantern swings overhead with the movement of the truck. Shadows slide across the reinforced walls.
Three steps. Turn. Three steps. Turn.
I lean back against Thaw and watch Fen wear the same path across the floor over and over.
Five threads hum quietly under my skin. The sixth is barely there, but it is there.