They did not ask. They did not need to ask. The cells they took were in a vial before the cells had a vote.
My hands are shaking.
I have to put the file down on top of the filing cabinet to keep from dropping it. The photograph of M. Hollens is face up onthe metal — her dark hair, her freckles, the small mouth that does not know what is in her. The patch on my chest is doing something The bonds are holding me. All six of them at once, lit, taut, refusing to let me fall down the inside of my own chest.
I need to sit.
I can’t. No time. The pack is in a Syndicate building and the clock is at minute eight of twenty and I cannot sit. I bend over instead and I put both palms flat on the metal and I let the shaking happen in my hands where it has a place to go, and I breathe.
I am the donor of cellular material I never consented to give.
There is a woman who does not know what I am, in a building somewhere, carrying a child whose genome is me and one of my mates.
The bonds are full. The pack is around me. Thaw's hand is at my back and the bond is pouring with I am here.
I will the shaking to stop.
I had told myself it would and I am still standing over the filing cabinet with both palms flat on the metal and the photograph of M. Hollens face-up under my hand and the shake has moved from my hands into my whole body.
There is a child growing. My child. In another woman.
The thought lands clean. It is the cleanest thing in the room. The child is not in my body. The child has never been in my body. The child does not know I exist. The child’s mother does not know I exist.
I do not know how to feel about a child. I do not know if the child is anything. I do not know what the Syndicate has put together inside M. Hollens, but I know it is mine.
I do not know which of the men in this room the other half of the child is from.
That is the thought I was not going to think and I am thinking it. The folder said compatible hybrid genome. The folder did notsay which hybrid. The donor on the other side of my vial in M. Hollens’s body could be Thaw. Could be Crull. Could be Harek. Could be Fen. The Syndicate had access to all four of them. The Syndicate took material from all four of them. The match could be any of them and it could be more than one of them in sequence. The child has biology. The biology has come from somebody specific. There is an answer. The folder just did not put it on this page.
My hands are not shaking anymore. They are not anything anymore. I am cold.
The patch on my chest is the only thing moving.
I am going to find her. I am going to find her and tell her what is in her and ask her what she wants done about it. That is the sentence I would say if anyone in this room asked me. It is a sentence that comes up fast and clean and it is the sentence I am going to use, when Thaw asks me what we do next. It is a true sentence. It is also a sentence that lets me stop standing here.
Behind me, Thaw has not spoken. The bond is wide open and what is in it is — not management. Not soothe. He is letting me have this. He is letting me have the seconds where I am not a queen and I am not a stabilizer where I am a woman who has just learned the Syndicate started a child without her, and he is standing behind me with his hand at the small of my back.
I do not deserve him.
That is the next thought and it lands harder than the child thought. I do not deserve him. I do not deserve any of them. They have been weapons in a program for thirty years. We are all of us in this room standing on a foundation a third party poured, and the third party is going to keep pouring foundation for twenty-three other women and a child I have not met, and what am I supposed to do with that. I do not get to be in love. I do not get to be a mate. I do not get to be a queen. The categories are all wrong because they were built by the program that builtme and the men I am bonded to and the only honest answer to the question is —
Thaw’s hand at my back closes.
He has read the spiral and he has decided he is done letting it run, and what comes through the bond is one clear short sentence in his voice, not out loud, the bond carrying it.
Stop.
I stop.
I am still cold. I am still flat. The shake has not come back. But the, I do not deserve him, thought has been — cut. Set aside. The pack does not negotiate with that thought and Thaw has just told me through the line that we are not going to.
I take a breath.
The child is real. The mother is real. The other twenty-three are real. The men around me are real. The bond is real. The patch is real. All of it is real and none of it is fair and the parts of it that are not fair do not get to be the part I solve right now in a Syndicate file room with a fire alarm about to go off and a Crull-sized orc in the doorway with an eye on the hall.
I will pick the unfair part up later. Not now. Now I am in a building I am going to burn.
I straighten up.
