I pull the collar of the sweatshirt down and I show them. The room goes silent.
Thaw's face goes blank.
"How long has it been like this?" he says. Careful.
"I don’t know. It was on the surface the last time I saw it. A spot. Warm. Red."
"It changed."
"Now it’s under my skin."
His thumb hovers over the skin and does not touch yet.
"Harek. Look."
Harek crouches. He is so tall the crouch brings his face level with my chest. He does not touch.Then he lifts two fingertips to my skin. Light. The third thread under my ribs goes warm and full. He breathes in. He closes his eyes.
When he opens them, he does not speak right away. He works for it.
"I don’t know."
I look at him.
"What does that mean?"
Thaw replies, "It means we have not seen this. Not on you. Not on anyone."
After the file, this is too much. My eyes fill.
"It is not a wound or a growth. Anything I can name."
"So nobody knows."
Thaw's voice goes quiet. "You have had it for weeks, Jen. It has not done anything but be there. Now it has moved. That is a change. We do not have a name for the change. We are going to keep an eye on it."
"Keep an eye on it."
"Yes."
"Until what."
"Until your body tells us what it is. Or until it does something we can read."
The pack is watching me. None of them is moving toward me.
I should be reassured. I am not.
What I feel — standing in a cabin bathroom with my sweatshirt pulled down off my shoulder and four men reading my body like an instrument panel and a dark shape under my own skin that pulses against my palm — is a slow black anger climbing up my spine that I did not know was waiting there.
"Cool." My voice is flat. "Cool. So we are going to wait and see."
"Yes."
The pack does not move.
"I went to the doctor because of that patch. I would not have gone to the doctor if it was not there. I do not go to the doctor. I have not had a panel in years. I went because the rash was sudden and would not go away. I was worried it was something. The clinic ran routine bloodwork. The Syndicate's reader caught it. The panel they pulled is the panel sitting in Dean's folder right now with my name on it."
I am breathing too fast.
