"What?"
"You need to see this."
Something in Dean's voice has changed.
Thaw is already on his feet.
"What did you find?"
"Not what. Who."
Chapter twenty-two
Jen
The captured doctor is sitting in a folding chair in the middle of the fire ring.
He is not the doctor from the lab. He is someone else. Mid-level. The only Syndicate man who came out of the trees alive with information we want. His name, by his vest ID, is Reyes.
He started talking quickly.
The wolves did not have to do much. He had been bound to the chair for ten minutes by then, and he had spent those ten minutes watching Fen sit on the ground at my calf. Reyes is a desk researcher. He had not seen what Fen could do until twenty minutes ago when Fen came down off the ridge and took one of his colleagues apart in the trees with his teeth. The other two of his colleagues are face down in the dirt fifteen yards behind him. Reyes is not in a situation he has been in before.
He started the moment Dean said his name.
He has been talking for ten minutes since. Dean is the one questioning him. I am sitting on a stump fifteen feet away because Thaw will not let me sit closer. Fen is at my left, on the ground beside me, his shoulder against my calf because we have settled on one point of contact at all times as the geometry that works for him. Crull is at my right, his huge bulk a wall, his amber eyes on the doctor. Harek is behind me, standing, the rifle in his hands. Thaw is at the doctor's chair. Not touching. Just there.
Most of what Reyes has said has been confirmation — the registry, the marker scores, the cycles, the forty-year project. The pieces I have been waiting for are the ones I do not yet have.
Dean asks the question for me.
"Tell us about her file."
Reyes's eyes flick to me. He sees me sitting on the stump. He sees the bonded males arranged around me. He sees Fen at my left.
He squints.
"You don't know," he says.
"Tell us."
He takes a breath.
"The Syndicate wants hybrid bloodlines. Trace-hybrid mothers were the candidates we could find, and most of them died, and the program kept going because the few who survived produced a deployable asset."
"Six live births," Dean says. "Two surviving adults."
"Yes."
"Then what is in her file."
Reyes's mouth works.
"The neurobiology behind why the high-marker women aren't just better breeders. They are betterbonders.We theorized that bonds stabilize the men they pair with. The trace-hybridmothers couldn't bond. The few who carried to mid-term — the six-point-three, the six-point-one — they were starting to show a stabilizing effect on their partners before they died. Quieter operators. Lower dosing requirements. The program managers were watching it. It was the data the program built around in the last decade."
"Stabilization."
"Stabilization. We have been refining the marker panel for a decade to find a woman who may be strong enough to stabilize a feral operator long-term. The breeding program kept running because we wanted the offspring. But the secondary track became — find a mother whose biology could do both. Carry hybrid pregnancies and stabilize the operators we already have. Saving the current operators was as important as making new ones. Possibly more important. The men we have are expensive to replace."
