The men have read that I need the question in the air without being answered, and they have stopped for me.
The cold sweeps through me. Hands first, then the back of my neck, then the inside of my arms. The folder was not the worst news. The folder was the warning, and the warning was already late. The men I am bonded to acted on a heat that was mine, and my body did what my body was built to do, and there is nobody in this room I can be angry with for the math actually adding up the way the math was projected to add up.
I have been furious at the Syndicate and the fury has been a thing I could carry. The fury does not fit this.
Harek's shoulder presses, very slightly, into the side of my knee. He is not soothing. He is reminding me he is here.
I let Thaw speak.
"I don't know, Jen. None of us — Crull, Harek, me — none of us have ever been a father. None of us knows whether the biology works the way they projected."
"So we wait."
"We wait."
"How long."
"Days. Maybe weeks. There's no test in this house. There's no clinic we can walk into without lighting up every Syndicate alert in three counties."
I close my eyes.
I have been waiting for things for weeks. Waiting for an alarm. Waiting for a cell door. Waiting for guards. I am tired of waiting. I am extremely tired of waiting. And what I am being asked to wait for now is whether my body is currently doing the thing the Syndicate spent forty years trying to engineer it to do.
I open my eyes.
I look down at Harek. He has turned his head a fraction so he can see my face from the floor. His green eyes are on mine. The shimmer at his collarbones is slow and steady. He is not telling me anything. He is just looking at me, the way he has looked at me since the kitchen.
I put my hand on his broad shoulder. He closes his eyes for one breath. His head turns into my arm.
"Okay," I say to the room. My voice is level. "Okay. I can't do anything about whether I am or I'm not, right now, in this house. So I'm going to sit. I'm going to eat something. I'm going to drink water. I'm going to lie down and take a nap. And when the other truck gets here, I'm going to be alive and breathing and not inpieces, because the alternative is that I spiral, and I don't have time to spiral."
Thaw's gold eyes are on my face.
"That sounds like a perfect plan."
"No it’s not, but the alternative involves tears and alcohol."
His mouth twitches — the small one, the version he uses when he's not allowed to laugh but wants to.
"Eat," he says. "Drink. Lie down. We'll be here."
"And you, Jen?" Dean asks.
I look at him.
"I have a job to do when the other truck pulls in. The job is be standing up when Fen sees me again. That's the thing I have. Everything else is for later."
Dean gives me a small smile and looks at me, almost with pride.
"That'll do."
I eat food Harek puts in front of me at the kitchen table. I drink water from a glass Harek refills before I have asked. I do not know when Harek went from being the quiet enormous one at the back of the cabin to being the man whose hands I am tracking in every room I enter, but here we are. He hasn't said three sentences all morning.
I go upstairs. Harek finds a bedroom for me at the front of the house — a room with one window looking into the firs, a real bed, a dresser, a worn rug. He turns down the bed. He goes back to the duffel and brings me a clean change of clothes and sets them on the dresser.
I lie down and Thaw sits in the wooden chair by the bed and Harek folds onto the floor at the foot of it like a guard dog — not exactly that, because guard dogs do not have shimmer pulsing slow under their skin and they do not lean their head against the side of the mattress where they know my hand can find them —and Dean is somewhere in the front of the house doing whatever wolves do at dawn.
I reach my hand down off the side of the mattress. Harek's hand is already there waiting for it.
