The room shifts.
Thaw's hand finds the back of my chair. Harek's eyes come off the front window and land on Dean. Daron has not moved but I feel the forming thread to him pull taut.
"Found something where," I say.
"Medical wing. On the way out last night. Daron grabbed the laptop. I grabbed everything on the desk and everything in the top drawer of the file cabinet. We did not know what we were taking. We have been processing it all night."
"Both of you."
"Daron walked the perimeter twice an hour. I read. We switched.”
I look at Daron. His ice-blue eyes are red-rimmed.
"That is what you have been doing."
I look back at Dean.
"Walk me through it."
Dean lays the folder on the table. He opens it. The top page is on Syndicate letterhead. Below it is a second folder I had not seen — older, manila, worn at the corners, the tab handwritten in pencil that has been overwritten in pen and then in pencil again. The label says EQUINOX in Dean's blocky print.
"These are the files," he says. "These are the new ones. This one is ours."
"Ours."
"Two years of work. After they took Thaw, we did not know where they had him or what they wanted with him. So we started taking things from them. Files. Emails. A junior staffer."
Daron answers from across the table. "He turned out to know less than we hoped. He was supposed to turn the brief in in the morning. He did not get to the morning."
Dean nods once. "The analyst's brief is what filled in the program for us. The cycle. The registry. We have been reading it for five weeks. That is what we knew when we walked into the facility last night."
He puts his hand on the worn folder.
"The Syndicate has been pulling blood records for forty plus years. Routine panels. Insurance screens. Genetic workups people do not know are being read. They are looking for anomalies — markers that should not appear in a fully human profile. Hybrid biology too far back to register as anything but a glitch."
"And they built a list."
"Yes. Women whose blood came back wrong in a way nobody ever told them. Whose physicians filed the panel under atypical, recommend monitoring, and never followed up because the markers were not anything dangerous on their own."
"How many?"
"Pacific Northwest, four hundred names. North America, two thousand."
"Two thousand women who don't know."
"Yes."
The kitchen is very quiet.
"The program runs on equinox windows. The compatible women have a biology that responds to the seasonal shift — the marker score climbs in the lead-up. The Syndicate times acquisition to the climb. Spring Equinox is March."
"They took me in February."
"You were eight days out."
Behind me, Thaw's hand has tightened on the chair.
"Okay," I say. "Keep going."
