"I am okay. I think."
"What can I do?"
"Bring the towels. Help me move clean up."
He brings the towels and helps me move. He is not delicate — he is efficient, the way Crull was efficient when he carried me, the way Thaw is efficient when he is holding the bond steady through a crisis. He gets me onto a folded towel on the floor by the bedside. The wet sheet bundles into another towel without anyone making a thing of it. Harek is already going to the bathroom for more towels.
The room is warm. The heat coming off whatever is leaving my body has fogged the lower edge of the window.
Dean crosses to it. He cracks it an inch.
The radio at his belt crackles.
The voice that comes through it is Daron's.
Dean. Drone. East ridge. Two miles. Heads up, brother.
It is the first time I have heard Daron's voice since the cargo door rolled down when we changed trucks. The forming thread to him pulls tight in my chest at the sound of it — relief that he is alive and close, alarm at what he is saying, and underneath it the bond reading him the way I have started reading all of them.
Dean's face changes.
"Thaw. Back of the house. Now."
Thaw has me up off the floor before I have processed what is happening. Harek is back from the bathroom and takes one look at Dean's face and drops the towels and gets between me and the front of the house. The three of them move me down the hallway to a back bedroom.
Dean is at the back window already, rifle in his hand. He sniffs the air. He swears, low.
"What is it?" I ask.
"The blood. The blood smell. It's not a normal smell, Jen. It's —"
"Carrying."
"Yes. The wind is coming up the draw. It's taking it east. Whatever is in your blood — whatever it's doing — is venting signal out the window. A signal that isn't normal blood."
"How fast?"
"Fast and the drone is only two miles east."
I am standing in a back bedroom in a towel and a borrowed sweatshirt with my own blood on the floor of the room next door, and a drone has just come up on the east ridge within minutes of my blood in the air.
"Thaw."
"They're scenting the air," Thaw says. His hand is on my back. "They have a profile of me. Of Crull. Of Harek. They have something of you, from the lab samples. They have been pinging everything for the right scent. They got something they did not expect, and they came to look."
"My blood called them."
"Yes."
"Not the cabin. Not the truck. Me."
"Yes."
I am the beacon.
The bond pulls. The hollow goes hot. Somewhere south of here, Fen has felt it. Something is wrong with me, and he is answering.
I press my palm to my sternum.
