Fen.
"Crull." Thaw does not look away from Fen's cell. "Get him."
Crull moves.
For the first time since the bars opened, the wall of him is not at my back and the second it is gone the corridor feels enormous and wrong, and I understand, in my body, how much of my calm for the last minute has been the simple fact of him standing there.
Then Thaw steps into the space Crull left.
The geometry closes around me again.
Crull reaches Fen's cell. Harek is already out and he and Crull nod at each other. Harek looks at Crull and gets one word out, rough and low and urgent.
"Careful."
Crull goes in.
Fen is face-down on the concrete where they dropped him. The dart he pulled out of his own chest is still on the floor three feet from his hand. He has not moved. The gas has him deep, deeper than I have ever felt him through the wall, the place under my sternum where his faint thread should be gone flat and cold and silent. When Crull crouches and gets a hand under him, Fen's body comes up loose. Boneless. A head that lolls against Crull's arm. Claws still out, because Fen's claws are always out, even unconscious, even now.
Crull lifts him.
Six and a half feet of feral hybrid over a shoulder, Crull's other hand splayed wide across the back of Fen's thigh to lock him there — and the rumble in Crull's chest changes. It does something I have not heard it do. It goes low and continuous and aimed down, at the unconscious body on his shoulder.
He is purring at Fen. I thought only Harek could purr.
Carrying him out of the cell that broke him, and purring the whole way, so that wherever Fen has gone under the gas, the first thing that reaches him that is not the lab is a brother's chest saying held, held, held.
My eyes sting. I do not have time for it. I breathe through it.
"Moving," Thaw says.
And we move.
Thaw in front. He reaches back without looking, finds my hand, folds my fingers into the back of his waistband and closes his own hand over mine for half a second — here, stay here — and then lets go and walks. Me behind him, fisted in the fabric. Crull behind me with Fen on his shoulder. Harek a half-step off my flank. I am inside all of them. Boxed on every side.
The north door. Dean in the frame of it, and past him the dark.
Dean's eyes find Thaw's. A question with no words in it.
"Out," Thaw says. "All of us. Now."
Dean looks once at the woman in the center of the pack.
At me.
The thread pulls taut. His. The twin of Daron's.
Something flashes across his face.
Whatever is climbing in him, he sets it aside for later, the way Daron could not quite manage and Dean can.
He turns. He takes the dark first, so that if there is anything waiting in it, it gets him before it gets the rest of us.
Daron falls in at the back, behind Crull, behind Fen. The last body. The door.
Thaw steps through into the dark and does not slow and does not look back to see if we follow.
He doesn't have to.
