I sleep.
I do not dream. I just go under faster than I expected to, because Harek's hand is in mine and Thaw is three feet from the bed and the bonds are full and warm and the room is warm and the threat is four hours away from this house, and I come back up to morning light through the window. The cabin is warm. The bonds are humming.
I am wet.
I sit up too fast. The sheet under my hips is —
I look.
There is blood on the sheet.
For one second I thinkperiod,and the relief that washes through me is so violent it makes me lightheaded — not pregnant, not pregnant, the body is doing the body's normal thing — and I almost laugh. I almost cry. I sit up and pull the sheet back to confirm.
I confirm. And then I stop.
Because the blood is wrong.
It is not the color it should be. It is too dark. Not period-dark. Ink-dark. It is the color of the shape under the skin of my chest, the patch color, the same exact shade — and I look at the sheet again and the blood is steaming. Faintly. The way a cup of coffee steams. A small heat coming off it. Not body-temperature heat. Hotter.
And at the edge where the blood meets the cotton of the sheet, the cotton is going brown.
Not stained brown. Scorched brown. A fine ring of darkened fiber, the kind of scorch you get from heat without flame.
I'm out of the bed before I've decided to be.
Harek is at my side before Thaw is — he was on the floor at the foot of the bed and he is on his feet in a fraction of a second, his green eyes already going to the sheet. Thaw is up out of the chair right behind him. Dean is at the bedroom door in seconds.
"Jen —"
"It's not a period, Thaw. Look at it. That's not blood. Look at the sheet."
Thaw looks.
His face goes blank.
He doesn't speak. He doesn't move. He just stands at the bedside and looks at what is on the cotton. He has worked for the Syndicate. He has seen horrible things. He's looking at the sheet on my bed with the careful blank of a man who hasn't seen this.
Harek is already on one knee at the bedside. His green eyes go to the blood and he does the thing he does with my body — the long deliberate scenting breath, the head tilted. He looks at the cotton. He looks at the steam.
He looks up at me.
"Activation."
Dean's head comes up sharp.
"The marker?"
Harek nods.
"It's starting."
The bedroom goes very still.
Dean is the first one to move. He crosses to the dresser, picks up a clean towel from the stack, and hands it to Harek. Harek folds it once and presses it to the sheet to absorb without smearing. He is doing it with the same long careful slowness he does everything.
I sit on the edge of the bed with the blood from my own body steaming on a sheet a few inches from my hip, and what the Syndicate's panel reader marked on a chart is happening in thisbedroom in real time, and the three men in the room with me know exactly what they are looking at.
I am not pregnant. I don’t think. I don’t know. What I know is that the marker score the Syndicate gave me is not a projection anymore. The hybrid breed they could not name is naming itself on a cotton sheet at the bottom of a road that does not exist on a map.
