23. Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
Jen
I take the stairs two at a time and I can hear her before I'm at the top.
Not a scream. A sound low in the chest, long, working through something, and it cuts off in the middle like a door shut on it.
Janet's got the door open. She's got her sleeves up and her hand on Madison's back and she doesn't look around at me.
"Good," she says. "Get on her other side."
Madison's on her feet with one hand on the footboard, folded forward over the other one, her nightshirt stuck to her back. Her hair's wet at the hairline. When it lets go of her she comes up and her eyes find me and there's nothing careful left in her face.
"Since ten," she says. "I thought I could do it by myself."
"How's that going?"
"Badly." Her hand comes off the footboard and clamps on my arm. "Don't go anywhere."
"I'm not going anywhere."
She grips hard enough that I feel it in the bone.
Harek's in with the kit, his calm presence helping already. He gets a hand low on her back.
"How far apart?"
"Two minutes. Less." She says. "It's speeding up. It's been speeding up since it started and it's not supposed to. First ones are slow. Every book says first ones are slow."
"You're not in any book," Harek says. Even. Not soft. "Nobody's had this kind the natural way. You're the first one there's ever been. It's going to do things the book doesn't have."
She breathes. It's coming again.
The contraction takes her. Two of three primates lived. Vance said that to her face.
Janet's got her from the other side, talking to her low, steady, the whole time — there you go, that's it, ride it out, don't fight the top of it — the same voice that's probably talked forty ninth-graders through a fire drill, and it works, because it doesn't care that any of this is impossible.
When Madison surfaces she's gray.
"The woman who built this is in the basement," she says.
"She is. Thaw's on her. I can have her up those stairs in ninety seconds." A pause. "Your call. It stays your call."
"No."
"Then no."
I stand there with her hand in mine and I think about how easy it would be.
I could go down those stairs and say one word and Vance would walk up here and put her hands on Madison whether Madison wanted it or not, and she'd do it well, because she's the only person alive who's ever administered that compound.
Nobody in this house could stop me. Nobody in this house would even try.
Madison said no.
That's the whole thing. That's the entire difference between this room and every room that woman ever built.
I don't move.
Fen's at the threshold.
He's stopped at the line of the door and he hasn't crossed it.
The dark lines are up at his throat, the shift at half and held there.
Crull's on the floor of the hall across from him, back against the wall, benched arm in his lap — the two of them keeping the doorway between them and the room, close enough to be here, far enough to stay out of it.
His line's pulled so tight I feel it in my teeth every time Madison's body folds her over. Nothing to do about it. Nothing to fix. A man watching a door.
Madison sees him between contractions.
"You can sit closer," she says. Breathless. "Where she can hear you."
He looks at her.
And I watch him remember the porch.
He sits with his back against the doorframe, outside it, close enough to see in. He doesn't say anything for a while. Long enough that I think he isn't going to.
Then he starts.
"The house is dark."
His voice is low and flat and it goes into the room like a stone into water.
"Everyone is awake. Nobody is asleep tonight. Crull is across from me in the hall and he has not moved. The dog is at the bottom of the stairs, sitting up. He has been sitting up for three hours."
He stops.
Madison's got her forehead against my shoulder, breathing through the top of one, and I feel her go still. Listening.
"Thaw is on the porch," Fen says. "Daron and Dean are on the north line walking the perimeter. The bread is under a cloth on the counter. Crull made it before dark."
He runs out.
The silence sits there.
"Keep going," Madison says, into my shoulder, wrecked.
He does.
"The trees start forty feet off the porch. Two hundred yards to the tree line on the east side, then the ridge. In the morning the light comes across the yard from the east and hits the kitchen window first. That is the first thing that gets warm."
Another one takes her, and Janet talks her through it while Fen talks under it, the two voices running at once, and Madison holds on to both.
"Nobody is coming," Fen says.
The room stops.
He doesn't hear it stop. He's not talking to us.
"There is no van. There is no road. Nobody knows this house. Nobody is coming, tonight or any night." A beat. "That is the first thing I want her to know."
Madison makes a sound that isn't a contraction.
He keeps going. He tells her the trees. He tells her the names.
He tells her Crull's arm is healing and Harek is a good one and Daron talks too much, and Madison — worn out and shaking and doing this early — laughs, once, cracked open, three seconds long, and Janet's got her before it turns into anything else.
He doesn't have many words. He said so on that porch. He spends every one of them, all night, on a person who can't hear him yet.
I've stood at the door of a cell he was in. I've seen what they did to him. I have never heard him talk this long.
Her legs give out around five and she wants the bed.
She goes on her side. Janet at her front with her arms around her shoulders. Harek at his work. Mara's at the dresser with the cloths and the things Harek laid out, handing them across when he asks, her own face wet and her hands steady.
I'm at the foot. When Madison's foot pushes out at me through a contraction I brace both hands against it and press back, hard, and she drives into it like it's the floor, and that becomes the one thing my body can do in this room.
I press. She breathes. The window goes gray.
The gaps keep shrinking. And under the nightshirt I can see the shape of her move in a way that isn't a kick — something turning, something with a will in it — and Harek sees it too, and neither of us says a word about it.
Fen's voice comes on through the door under all of it.
Somewhere in there he starts saying the same things over. The trees. The pack. The bread on the counter. Nobody is coming.
It doesn't sound like less the second time.
Then something changes all the way through Madison's body and her voice comes up out of the low place.
"I have to push."
Harek checks. Looks up.
"You can push."
And the room turns. The waiting's done and the work has a direction.
Madison pushes.
She's moved me up to her shoulder and her hand in mine is a vise.
She bears down in long efforts with Harek counting her through low and steady, and between them she drops back with her eyes shut and her chest going and then sets her jaw and goes again.
Janet's face is right there in hers the whole time. You're doing it. Again. Now.
It takes everything she has. Then it takes more than she has and she finds it anyway, twice, three times, somewhere underneath the last one.
I look at the door. Fen hasn't moved. The dark lines are up his throat and his breathing has matched hers without him knowing it, and he's still talking, quieter now, so low it's under the sound of the room.
"Head," Harek says, and the calm cracks — the smallest lift in his voice, the first one all night. "Madison. One more like that one."
She gives him one more like that one.
The baby comes in a slide, into Harek's hands.
The whole room lets go at once.
She makes a sound — wet, more breath than cry, and then a real one, thin and furious. Her arms move. Her legs move. Across the hall Crull's line goes through me so hard I have to put a hand on the bed. Far down, downstairs, I feel Thaw's ease.
Harek brings her up and lays her on Madison's chest.
Madison's breathing hard, soaked, her face wrecked, and her hand goes to the daughter without her telling it to.
"Hello," she says.
Then quieter. The second time. Her hand cupping the back of the small head.
"Hello."
Harek works the cord and the rest of it and his shoulders come down out of where they've been all night.
I look at the baby.
Her eyes open. Dark — black at the iris with something moving under it, dark in a way a newborn's eyes are not. They don't fix on anything yet. The skin's pale and under the pale is a shadow that isn't bruising. Her hands are tiny and at the fingertips there are claws. Soft. Half-formed. There.
Madison looks at them a long time. She runs her thumb over one and doesn't flinch.
She's known what her daughter would be since the night she learned about Fen and I.
Harek finishes. Mara steps back. Janet’s got her hand on Madison's hair.
Madison looks up at me.
"Bring him in."
Fen stands up in the hall. He crosses the threshold for the first time.
He comes to the bed and kneels and then he stops with his hands at his sides, the dark eyes on the small shape on Madison's chest, and he doesn't move at all.
Madison shifts the daughter, and stops, her hand staying on the small back a second longer.
She looks at Fen. The man who's sat outside every room she's been in since she came and never once asked to come closer.
"She's not going to grow up with less because I was afraid," she says. She looks at me. "Both of you. All of you."
Then back to Fen.
"No more hallways."
She holds her daughter out.
"Take her."
He looks at Madison first. One last time — the question he's been asking since the porch step and never once said out loud.
She doesn't look away from it. She nods.
He puts his hands out and they aren't steady.
The claws are gone. The fingers are blunt and careful. And they shake, and I have never in my life seen Fen's hands shake — not on a ridge, not in a white room, not with a man's throat under them.
Madison sets her into them.
He cups her the way you hold a thing you're afraid of breaking just by being what you are.
The shift doesn't come up. I didn't know I'd been waiting for it until it didn't.
He looks at her. She doesn't look back. Her eyes aren't there yet.
“Hi.”
She turns her head toward him. Toward his voice. The one she's had all night, through a door, from a man who doesn't have many and gave her all of them.
Fen sees it. Everything he has left goes out of him at once, and I have to put my hand on the bed again.
"Daughter," he says.
Not loud. Just his own voice, the way a man says it the first time.
Madison's watching them, her face wet, and she's smiling.
Fen can't reach for me while holding the baby. He looks at me instead.
Our gaze locks. Our bond is full.
"Gabrielle," Madison says from the bed, watching the three of us. Tired all the way through. "We'll call her Gabi."
The mark on my sternum is hot.
Gabi sleeps in his arms.