12. Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
Jen
The cars in the lot are wrong.
Daron sees them before I do. We have driven past the building once — a slow pass at the end of the block, plates clean, windows un-tinted — and we are around the corner before either of us speaks.
"Sedan and a van," Daron says. "Sedan has a driver. Van is empty in the cab. Two in the back, minimum. Maybe four."
"How long have they been there?"
"Overnight. Pollen's settled on the windshields. They haven't moved."
He pulls into an alley two blocks south and kills the engine. Jeans, flannel, the shape of a gun under the flannel at his hip. His eyes stay on the building.
"Ten minutes," he says. "If you're not out, I come up."
He stays at the wheel. I walk out of the alley toward her building.
The duplex front door is propped open with a brick, mail piling up in the entryway. I step over it, take the wooden stairs to the second floor, and stop at 2B.
I knock. No footsteps. Just the floorboards shifting. Then a voice, quiet, behind the wood.
"Who’s there?"
"My name is Jen. I'm not with the people in the lot."
"How do you know about the people in the lot?"
"I've been watching them since I drove past twenty minutes ago. I want to talk to you."
A longer silence this time.
"You're alone?"
"At your door, yes. One person in my truck, two blocks away."
"Show me your hands."
I lift them to the peephole. Palms out. Empty.
The peephole goes dark while she looks, and stays dark a long count. Then the deadbolt. The door opens to the chain limit and stops there.
Elma Reyna is at the gap. Five-eight, hair pulled back tight, green scrubs. Dark eyes, set mouth, one hand on the inside of the door and the other below the gap where I can't see it.
I don't know what's in her other hand. I don't need to.
"Talk," she says.
"I'm going to tell you a few things that happened to me. You tell me if any of them sound familiar."
She doesn't say no.
"Sometime in the last year you had blood drawn. And the results came back wrong — numbers that didn't make sense, nothing your doctor could name."
A pause on the other side of the door.
"They ran it again to be sure. Same result. Then they sent it out — a specialty lab, somewhere that wasn't your usual. And after that your doctor got quiet. Stopped calling you back."
The hand below the gap goes still.
"Then people started showing up. Not neighbors. Men who stand wrong. Sit in cars too long. One of them knew your name when he shouldn't have."
The chain is still on. But she hasn't moved to shut the door either.
"Stop," she says. Quiet. "How do you know about my labs?"
"I don't. That’s my story. That's the year I had, right before they put me in a cell." I keep my hands where she can see them. "I'm guessing it's yours too. Tell me I'm wrong and I'll go."
She isn’t blinking now. Just staring at me.
"There are people downstairs who'll come up these stairs within the hour. I'm here to get you out before they do. I'm with a group that takes people away from what those people are part of. If you want me to leave, I will. I'm asking for two minutes."
She watches me. I don't look away.
"Why now?"
"Your name's on a list. I have it. You're at the top."
"I’m on a list."
"It came out of the building they took me from. I've been working through it since."
"You were kidnapped?"
"Last month. Escaped because other people helped me. We've been getting people out ever since."
Her eyes hold mine a long second.
She closes the door. The chain slides off. The door opens.
"Come in."
I step inside. She closes it behind me. Chain. Deadbolt. The hand she's been keeping below the gap goes into her pocket, and I don't see what was in it.
There's a duffel by the door. Packed, zipped, sitting on a pair of running shoes.
"How long do I have?"
"Probably ten minutes. Less if they think you’re leaving."
Her eyes drop to the duffel, then come back to me.
"That bag's been packed for six months."
"Tell me why."
"My CBC came back wrong last fall. Numbers my doctor couldn't explain. She ordered a follow-up, the second panel came back the same, and then she stopped returning my calls. That was the first thing."
"What was the second?"
"Around the new year a man showed up at the ER and asked for me by name. I'd never given my unit to anyone. He left when I was in the back, came back the next week. The third time, I told my charge nurse, she put security at the door, and he stopped coming. But I knew somebody was looking."
"And the cars."
"Last week. A large sedan two days ago, and again yesterday. I've been packing this bag and re-packing it for months. The van showed up yesterday. I figured that meant they'd decided to move."
"And you didn't run."
"Where would I run? I don't know who they are. I don't know why they want me. I've been trying to decide if I’m just crazy or if anywhere was safe."
I pick up the duffel off the running shoes and hold it out to her.
She breathes out. "You are not crazy and we need to go."
We are down the stairs and out the side door in three minutes. Daron has the truck nosed up to the mouth of the alley, running, the passenger door already swinging open as we cross. Elma climbs into the back with the duffel. I take the front. He pulls out before my door's shut.
We make the corner, and behind us the van door rolls open.
I catch it in the side mirror — the cargo door of the white van sliding back, men coming out of it fast, three of them, moving across the lot toward her building at a dead clip.
One peels toward the propped front door.
Two take the side. The way they move says they already know which unit, already know the layout, already know she's on the second floor behind a chain and a deadbolt that would have held for about as long as it took them to put a shoulder through it.
The duplex slides out of sight as Daron takes the next turn.
Elma is twisted around in the seat, watching out the back glass. She saw it too.
"That was for me," she says.
"Yes."
"If you'd knocked twenty minutes later."
"We didn't."
She faces forward. Her hands are shaking on the duffel.
Daron checks the mirror once, twice, takes a third turn that isn't on the way to anywhere, and watches the road behind us empty out. "Clear," he says. "They went for the door, not the street. They were looking up at your windows. Not at us."
Daron lets out a breath, and for a second the tactical drops out of his voice. "That was closer than I wanted."
Elma looks at the back of his head. Something in her shoulders comes down half an inch.
"Okay," she says.
I turn in the seat to face her. "I'm going to tell you what we know. If you want me to stop, say so."
A short nod.
There's something in her blood. The Syndicate has been after it for forty years. Women who have it can carry a pregnancy the program has spent that whole time trying to make work, and almost none of it has. They were going to use her.
Her hands go white on the duffel. "Use me how."
"Take an egg, fertilize it with stored material, put it back, keep you in a facility for the term. It isn't a normal pregnancy. The hybrid carries six weeks, start to finish — and they have a way to crush even that into four days."
"Four days." She shakes her head once. "That isn't possible."
"It is. They have a protocol and it works. Barely. Most of the women don't survive it. Most of the children don't either."
She doesn't ask for the count. I watch her get there on her own — the nurse in her running the arithmetic of forty years and almost nothing to show for it — and her face changes.
Her hand goes over her mouth.
"Stop," she says, through it. "Just — wait."
I stop.
She looks at the floor of the truck, breathing through her hand, eyes shut. I don't say anything. Daron doesn't check the rearview. The only sound in the cab is her breath against her own palm.
She holds it a long time. Then she lowers her hand.
"Keep going."
"They got further with another woman than they got with you. Madison. The pregnancy's in her body now. They put her on the four-day protocol two days ago — last night we got her off it. There's a drug that shuts the acceleration down and drops her back to the normal rate.”
I laugh at myself. At the absurdity of thinking 6 weeks is the “normal” time for a pregnancy now.
“Six weeks instead of four days. She has about three weeks left, and she chose that herself."
"She's alive."
"Alive. Angry. Twenty-six, a teacher, making her own calls about her own body."
Elma shuts her eyes again.
"I'm a nurse. I've done OB rotations. The placenta needs time. The cardiac load builds week by week. The vascular system accommodates over months, because months is what it has. I don't understand how anything finishes in four days without killing her."
"We don't know either. We have the doctor who ran her site in custody — Vance, the one who built the protocol. We're getting it out of her."
The dark eyes go wider than they've been the whole drive.
"You kidnapped a doctor”"
"Held against her will. Alive. Treated decently. She's going to tell us everything she knows, because her alternative is worse."
"Worse how."
"I won't lie to you. She's in the basement of a property with my pack in it. The men I'm with are dangerous. She's alive because we've decided she's more useful that way."
Elma laughs once. It isn't a laugh. It's the sound a body makes when it's been handed more than it can hold in fifteen minutes.
"I don't know what's happening. I'm in the middle of something . . . I just got in a truck with strangers." She shuts her eyes. "I want all of it. Now, while I'm in this truck and I can't leave. I want to hear it at once and deal with it after. Keep going."
"Okay." The men in the program weren't asked either, I tell her — the Syndicate's been collecting genetic material from hybrid males for decades. The one whose material may have gone into you is in our group. He was in a cell. We all escaped last month.
She breathes out hard, both hands on the duffel, holding it like it's the only solid thing in the cab.
"What does hybrid male mean?"