"Jen."
"Yes."
He does not say anything else. He puts his hand at the side of my jaw, kisses my forehead.
The breach is clean for the first six minutes.
Dean drops the south guard at the door. Daron drops the second one inside thirty seconds later, the man down before he registers what is happening. Harek and Fen are through the north door — I cannot see them, I can only feel them through the bonds. Crull and Thaw and I are at the east loading bay, and Thaw has the door open with a tool Dean handed him and we are inside.
The interior of Site Theresa smells the way the lab smelled.
I have not let myself think about that smell since I have been out. The lab had it. The cell block had it. Whatever industrial cleaning compound the Syndicate uses to scrub their containment areas has a chemical signature my body knows, the way my body knew the medical wing the night of the breach. The patch on my chest flares the second the air hits me. The bonds tighten. Every nerve from my sternum to my fingertips lights up — enemy ground, enemy ground, enemy ground.
"Steady," Thaw says, low. His hand is at my back.
Crull moves ahead. He has gone full orc. He is the biggest thing in any hallway in this building and that is the point of him. He sweeps the loading bay's interior, finds no contacts, signs us forward.
We move down the central hallway.
I am at Thaw's hip. He is in his half-shift — gold eyes, the patterning up under his skin, the claws out. The heat coming off him is high. He is angry in a way I have not felt him be — angry at being inside a Syndicate building again, angry at the smell, angry at the math of every door we pass and the offices behind them and the work that has been done in those offices on women whose names he does not yet know.
The patch on my chest is doing something new.
It is pulling.
Not pulsing. Pulling. Aimed forward — down the hallway, toward whatever room is at the end of this corridor. The fivelines under my skin that map to my five sealed bonds have gone bright, and the sixth line — the one that drew itself toward Fen — has gone bright too. All six lines are aimed in the same direction.
The same direction my body is being pulled.
"Thaw."
"What."
"The patch is pulling. Forward. I do not know what is in front of us but my body wants to go."
His gold eyes flick to me. "Go how."
"Run. The patch is — pulling me. Toward whatever is at the end of this hall. I do not — I think it is reading something. I think there is something it is reading."
Thaw's jaw sets.
"You stay with me. We move together. You do not run. Whatever it is reading, we read it at walking speed."
"Yes."
But the pull is strong and my body wants to obey it and I have to lock my legs into Thaw's pace, deliberately, the way I locked my voice into down in the campground yesterday — I am the one in charge of my body, the patch is not, the bonds are not, the lines do not get to drive. Thaw feels me do it through the bond. His mouth twitches a fraction. Approval. The bond carries it.
We come to a door at the end of the hallway.
It is unmarked. There is a numeric keypad. Thaw looks at Dean — Dean has come up behind us silent, the south team's clear-sign already given through the earpiece — and Dean has the keypad open and bypassed in twenty seconds.
The door opens.
Inside is a small office. Filing cabinets. A computer terminal. A printer. The hum of HVAC. The smell is stronger here — the chemical-clean of the lab, layered with something underneath, something organic.
The patch under my chest pulls so hard I stagger.
Thaw catches me. "Jen."
