Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
Jen
Site Theresa is a one-story concrete building disguised as a warehouse.
I learn this from Dean as we drive. He has been watching it for a year — drone flyovers, traffic counts, the names of the contractors who come and go — and he has more on it than Reyes does.
The twins have been hunting the Syndicate for two years.
They have been hunting specific Syndicate sites.
Theresa is one of the ones they have been waiting to hit and waiting for a reason to.
The reason rode in their truck this morning, and her name is on a chart in red ink.
We approach from the north on a logging road that does not connect to the site's access road. We park the trucks a half mile out, behind a ridge that puts us out of sightline. The night is cold and the sky has the particular blue-black of a Cascade night with no moon.
We are seven. Reyes is in the cabin locked up. The pack is here.
Thaw briefs us at the edge of the trees.
"Dean and Daron take the south door. Harek and Fen take the north.
Crull and Jen and I take the loading bay east. Two armed staff.
Dean drops them quiet. Daron sweeps. Harek and Fen clear the offices on the north.
Crull and I clear the central storage room with Jen between us.
We have twenty minutes from breach to extraction. Watches synchronized."
He looks at each of us.
"Jen stays at my hip until I say otherwise. Do you understand."
"Yes."
"If I tell you to stop, you stop. If I tell you to move, you move. If I tell you to down —" he glances at Fen — "you down. Are we clear."
"Yes."
He looks at Fen.
"Brother."
"Wall."
"Wall. Tonight you are the wall. Not the kill. Not the chase. If a target presents and Harek can take it, Harek takes it. You hold. Are we clear."
"Yes, alpha."
The pack does the half-fist over the heart. I do it with them — I have learned the gesture without anyone teaching me. The pack-sign is mine now.
Thaw looks at me last.
"Jen."
"Yes."
He does not say anything else. He puts his hand at the side of my jaw, kisses my forehead.
The breach is clean for the first six minutes.
Dean drops the south guard at the door. Daron drops the second one inside thirty seconds later, the man down before he registers what is happening.
Harek and Fen are through the north door — I cannot see them, I can only feel them through the bonds.
Crull and Thaw and I are at the east loading bay, and Thaw has the door open with a tool Dean handed him and we are inside.
The interior of Site Theresa smells the way the lab smelled.
I have not let myself think about that smell since I have been out.
The lab had it. The cell block had it. Whatever industrial cleaning compound the Syndicate uses to scrub their containment areas has a chemical signature my body knows, the way my body knew the medical wing the night of the breach.
The patch on my chest flares the second the air hits me.
The bonds tighten. Every nerve from my sternum to my fingertips lights up — enemy ground, enemy ground, enemy ground.
"Steady," Thaw says, low. His hand is at my back.
Crull moves ahead. He has gone full orc. He is the biggest thing in any hallway in this building and that is the point of him. He sweeps the loading bay's interior, finds no contacts, signs us forward.
We move down the central hallway.
I am at Thaw's hip. He is in his half-shift — gold eyes, the patterning up under his skin, the claws out.
The heat coming off him is high. He is angry in a way I have not felt him be — angry at being inside a Syndicate building again, angry at the smell, angry at the math of every door we pass and the offices behind them and the work that has been done in those offices on women whose names he does not yet know.
The patch on my chest is doing something new.
It is pulling.
Not pulsing. Pulling. Aimed forward — down the hallway, toward whatever room is at the end of this corridor.
The five lines under my skin that map to my five sealed bonds have gone bright, and the sixth line — the one that drew itself toward Fen — has gone bright too.
All six lines are aimed in the same direction.
The same direction my body is being pulled.
"Thaw."
"What."
"The patch is pulling. Forward. I do not know what is in front of us but my body wants to go."
His gold eyes flick to me. "Go how."
"Run. The patch is — pulling me. Toward whatever is at the end of this hall. I do not — I think it is reading something. I think there is something it is reading."
Thaw's jaw sets.
"You stay with me. We move together. You do not run. Whatever it is reading, we read it at walking speed."
"Yes."
But the pull is strong and my body wants to obey it and I have to lock my legs into Thaw's pace, deliberately, the way I locked my voice into down in the campground yesterday — I am the one in charge of my body, the patch is not, the bonds are not, the lines do not get to drive.
Thaw feels me do it through the bond. His mouth twitches a fraction. Approval. The bond carries it.
We come to a door at the end of the hallway.
It is unmarked. There is a numeric keypad. Thaw looks at Dean — Dean has come up behind us silent, the south team's clear-sign already given through the earpiece — and Dean has the keypad open and bypassed in twenty seconds.
The door opens.
Inside is a small office. Filing cabinets. A computer terminal. A printer. The hum of HVAC. The smell is stronger here — the chemical-clean of the lab, layered with something underneath, something organic.
The patch under my chest pulls so hard I stagger.
Thaw catches me. "Jen."
"I am okay. The pull — it is here. It is here, Thaw. Whatever it is, it is in this room."
His gold eyes sweep the room. Crull has come in behind us, filling the doorway. Dean is in front of us at the terminal, already plugging in the small black storage drive he has been carrying.
"Files," Dean says. Quiet. "I am pulling everything on this machine. Two minutes."
"Crull."
"Yes."
"Watch the door."
"Yes."
I turn to the filing cabinets.
The patch is screaming now. Not pain. Direction. Here, here, here. I cross the office in three steps and Thaw is half a step behind me, his hand at my back, and I open the cabinet labeled DONOR PROGRAM — ACTIVE, and I start pulling files.
The files are organized by year. Then by region. Then by name.
I pull active. I pull Pacific Northwest. I am looking for Griggson. I find Griggson at the back of the active folder, my own file.
I take it. I put it in my coat.
I pull the file behind mine. The name on the tab is Hollens, M.
I open it.
The file is the same format as mine. Personal data.
Blood panel. Marker score. Cycle schedule.
There is a photograph clipped to the inside cover — a young woman with dark hair and a freckle pattern across her nose, mid-twenties, smiling in a passport photo.
The photo has a red sticker across the corner that says ACQUIRED.
There is a second sticker under it that says PREGNANT.
I read it twice. I read it three times.
There is a photocopied page tucked into the back of the folder — a Syndicate internal memo, dated three weeks ago — and the memo is a progress report. I read the first line.
Subject Hollens, M. Pregnancy confirmed. Marker score 6.1. Projected donor: Subject Griggson, J., file 47 — selected as cycle pair on basis of compatible hybrid genome.
I stop reading.
I review what I read: Hollens. Pregnant. Donor. Griggson.
The patch on my chest is vibrating.
There is a woman.
There is a woman who was kidnapped. There is a woman whose blood panel scored six-point-one. There is a woman who is currently pregnant in a facility somewhere with a child whose projected donor — is me.
The genetic match is me.
For one second my body refuses the sentence.
It is the same physical refusal as the no I said reflexively to the word queen in the campground yesterday.
The patch goes cold. The bonds tighten all at once — Thaw's hand on my back goes hot, Crull's brand at my wrist throbs, Harek's at my throat pulses, the bonds to the twins pull taut, the not-yet-thread to Fen flares — every line in my chest registering at the same time that my body has just been told a thing it does not have a category for.
Pregnant.
There is a child somewhere.
There is a child whose biology is half mine, placed in another woman.
They did not ask. They did not need to ask. The cells they took were in a vial before the cells had a vote.
My hands are shaking.
I have to put the file down on top of the filing cabinet to keep from dropping it.
The photograph of M. Hollens is face up on the metal — her dark hair, her freckles, the small mouth that does not know what is in her.
The patch on my chest is doing something The bonds are holding me.
All six of them at once, lit, taut, refusing to let me fall down the inside of my own chest.
I need to sit.
I can’t. No time. The pack is in a Syndicate building and the clock is at minute eight of twenty and I cannot sit. I bend over instead and I put both palms flat on the metal and I let the shaking happen in my hands where it has a place to go, and I breathe.
I am the donor of cellular material I never consented to give.
There is a woman who does not know what I am, in a building somewhere, carrying a child whose genome is me and one of my mates.
The bonds are full. The pack is around me. Thaw's hand is at my back and the bond is pouring with I am here.
I will the shaking to stop.
I had told myself it would and I am still standing over the filing cabinet with both palms flat on the metal and the photograph of M. Hollens face-up under my hand and the shake has moved from my hands into my whole body.
There is a child growing. My child. In another woman.