Chapter 22
Chapter twenty-two
Jen
The captured doctor is sitting in a folding chair in the middle of the fire ring.
He is not the doctor from the lab. He is someone else. Mid-level. The only Syndicate man who came out of the trees alive with information we want. His name, by his vest ID, is Reyes.
He started talking quickly.
The wolves did not have to do much. He had been bound to the chair for ten minutes by then, and he had spent those ten minutes watching Fen sit on the ground at my calf.
Reyes is a desk researcher. He had not seen what Fen could do until twenty minutes ago when Fen came down off the ridge and took one of his colleagues apart in the trees with his teeth.
The other two of his colleagues are face down in the dirt fifteen yards behind him.
Reyes is not in a situation he has been in before.
He started the moment Dean said his name.
He has been talking for ten minutes since.
Dean is the one questioning him. I am sitting on a stump fifteen feet away because Thaw will not let me sit closer.
Fen is at my left, on the ground beside me, his shoulder against my calf because we have settled on one point of contact at all times as the geometry that works for him.
Crull is at my right, his huge bulk a wall, his amber eyes on the doctor.
Harek is behind me, standing, the rifle in his hands.
Thaw is at the doctor's chair. Not touching. Just there.
Most of what Reyes has said has been confirmation — the registry, the marker scores, the cycles, the forty-year project. The pieces I have been waiting for are the ones I do not yet have.
Dean asks the question for me.
"Tell us about her file."
Reyes's eyes flick to me. He sees me sitting on the stump. He sees the bonded males arranged around me. He sees Fen at my left.
He squints.
"You don't know," he says.
"Tell us."
He takes a breath.
"The Syndicate wants hybrid bloodlines. Trace-hybrid mothers were the candidates we could find, and most of them died, and the program kept going because the few who survived produced a deployable asset."
"Six live births," Dean says. "Two surviving adults."
"Yes."
"Then what is in her file."
Reyes's mouth works.
"The neurobiology behind why the high-marker women aren't just better breeders.
They are better bonders. We theorized that bonds stabilize the men they pair with.
The trace-hybrid mothers couldn't bond. The few who carried to mid-term — the six-point-three, the six-point-one — they were starting to show a stabilizing effect on their partners before they died.
Quieter operators. Lower dosing requirements.
The program managers were watching it. It was the data the program built around in the last decade. "
"Stabilization."
"Stabilization. We have been refining the marker panel for a decade to find a woman who may be strong enough to stabilize a feral operator long-term.
The breeding program kept running because we wanted the offspring.
But the secondary track became — find a mother whose biology could do both.
Carry hybrid pregnancies and stabilize the operators we already have.
Saving the current operators was as important as making new ones.
Possibly more important. The men we have are expensive to replace. "
I can stay quiet no longer. "And me?"
"You came in at seven-point-four. The highest marker score the registry has ever produced.
We hypothesized your bonds would be strong enough to carry pregnancies where the trace-hybrid mothers couldn't, and we expected you would stabilize whichever operators you bonded with.
Both. That was the model. Breed you, observe the stabilization, deploy the bond as a calming presence for the broader operator pool over time. "
He looks at me. His face is the face of a man who has decided he is going to live longer if he tells the whole truth.
"You were going to be a mother and a stabilizing agent at the same time, Miss Griggson. That is what File —" he stops. "That is what all of the planning was for."
Fen's shoulder against my calf is vibrating, low and continuous with his growl. Crull's hand finds my shoulder. The bond at my sternum has gone taut with Thaw's attention.
"How sure were you that it would work?"
"We weren't. We had never had a candidate above six-three. You were the first one we could test the model on. The men were the test bed."
"You wanted babies and a leash on the men I bonded to."
"We wanted babies and a calming presence. The men go feral. The program loses operators. We wanted to stop losing them. That is what your bonding ability was supposed to do."
I sit with it.
The Syndicate's plan for me is breeding and stabilization.
They wanted me to carry their hybrid pregnancies and quiet down their unstable assets while I did it.
The eight-year refinement of the marker panel was about finding a woman whose body could do both jobs.
They were running a breeding program with an upside.
I get off the stump.
I walk toward the doctor. Fen comes with me because Fen is on my calf and Fen is not letting go. Crull moves to follow because Crull does not let me get within ten feet of an enemy alone. The wolves and Harek tighten behind me. The whole pack is moving with me.
I stop in front of his chair.
I look down at him.
"What did you call it. In the file. What were you going to deploy me as."
"A bonded stabilizer. A long-term containment asset. The language in the file is technical."
"A leash."
"A presence. They are not the same word, in the language of the program. I am not selling it to you. I am telling you what the file says."
"And if I refused to be deployed."
"You weren't going to refuse. You were going to be brought in over a course of months, paired with the men under controlled exposure, bonded under conditions the program controlled. Your refusal was not a variable the planning accounted for."
"And what I just did to Fen in the trees twenty minutes ago. What is the language for that."
He looks at me.
For one second he does not have a word. He is a desk researcher with a model and the model does not contain the thing I just did. I watch his face try to fit what he is looking at into the categories he came in with, and the categories do not hold.
"I don't —" he says. "I don't have language for that. We did not project that as a possibility."
"You did not project that as a possibility."
"No."
"What would the file have called it. If it had happened in your lab."
He swallows.
"In the program's language? I don't know. The closest word the models reach for —"
He stops.
He looks at the pack around me.
He says it very quietly.
"Queen."
The word lands in the fire ring like a coin on tile.
"No."
It comes out of me before I have decided to say it.
Flat. Reflexive. The same gear as the down I used on Fen, but pointed inward this time — a refusal of a category, a that is not a word that goes on me.
My body does not want it. Queen is a word from books.
Not for an animal control officer from Vancouver, Washington who got grabbed off a gravel road in February and bonded to monsters.
Reyes does not contradict me. He does not need to.
The pack does it for him.
Crull is the first. His hand is on my shoulder. The rumble in his chest has gone to the register I have only heard once before — the one he used when he carried Fen through the corridor. The I have him register. He is using it on me. On the air around me. On the word.
"Mine," Crull says. "Queen."
Harek behind me.
"Yours," he says. Whole sentence. Steady.
Dean. The forming thread pulls taut.
"Yours."
Daron, from the edge of the fire ring. Ice-blue eyes.
"Took you long enough."
Fen.
Fen's shoulder against my calf goes hot. His face turns up toward mine. The black-and-red-and-gold eyes find me. The man behind the black is all the way there.
"Mine," he says.
I look at all of them.
I look at Thaw last.
Thaw's gold eyes are wet at the rims. He nods. Just once.
The No I said is still on the ground between me and the doctor. Nobody overrides it. The pack has not contradicted me — they have named me, one at a time, in the language they have, and the language has decided the word fits whether I am ready for it or not.
I am not ready for it.
I take it anyway.
"Yours," I say to Fen. Quiet.
The pack is around me, every one of them, the first time since the cabin I have had all six in one place at one time.
I turn to Thaw.
"What do we do with him?"
Thaw looks at Reyes.
"We take him with us. He has more than he has given us. We want the details."
"Will he come?"
Thaw's mouth twitches.
"He will. Won't you, doctor?"
"Yes," Reyes says, very quickly. "Yes, I will."
"Good."
I look at my pack.
The wind has stopped.
The pack is moving with me toward the truck, and Fen is at my left with his hand finally taking mine on purpose, and the bond is full.