The slope drops away under us and the timber closes over our heads.
The forest swallows the light behind us and we disappear into the dark.
The Syndicate is still behind us. Armed. Organized. Hunting.
I know that. But all I can think about is the way five monsters closed ranks around me.
No open side. Not one.
The whole way down.
Chapter four
Jen
We run.
The forest drops away under us in wet black slopes. Nobody slows down.
Dean is a shape between the trunks ahead of us, gone and then back, gone and then back. Daron stays somewhere behind us. Thaw keeps the pace brutal. Crull carries Fen over one shoulder like he weighs nothing.
My lungs burn. My legs burn. Nobody seems interested in stopping.
Then the trees thin and a road appears below us. And there is a truck parked on it. No headlights. No engine. No markings. Just a dented box truck sitting in the dark.
Dean reaches it first. By the time the rest of us hit the road, he already has a hand on the cargo door. The metal rattles as he rolls it upward and every one of us turns toward the trees.
Inside the truck is a dark square.
"In," Thaw says.
His eyes find mine.
"Jen first."
I walk to the back of the truck.
And stop.
Because the inside of the cargo box is not empty space. The twins have built in here. There is a partition — steel mesh, heavy gauge, bolted into a frame that has been welded to the truck's own ribs — dividing the box into a larger forward section and a smaller one at the back. There are restraint points. I can see them, dark rings set into the reinforced wall, the webbing straps coiled and clipped beside each one. There is a low bench fitted along one side with a panel above it that hangs open, and inside the panel: trauma shears, rolled bandage, IV tubing, a rack of capped vials, sedation in labeled syringes.
My stomach goes straight down through the gravel.
It is a cell.
They built a cell. They built a smaller version of the thing I have been clawing my way out of for weeks, restraints and a medical tray and a steel mesh wall, and it is in the truck, it is the thing I am being told to climb into —
"We didn't know what we were pulling out," Dean says.
That is all he says at first.
"Two years," he goes on, and his voice is flat and even and costing him. "Two years we thought he was dead. Then we found out he wasn't, and where he was, and what that place was. And we did not know — " he stops, starts again — "we did not know if the thing we carried out of there would still be Thaw. Or if it would be a feral that didn't know us. Something we'd have tosedate, or chain, just to get it down a mountain without it killing us."
He looks at the mesh. At the rings. At the coiled straps.
"So we built somewhere to put him." His jaw works. "Our own brother. We built a cell for our own brother and we drove it up here hoping the whole way we wouldn't need it."
Behind me, Thaw makes a sound. Quiet. I feel it more than hear it, through the bond — something cracking and resettling.
