"Jen," Thaw says. Quiet. He has read every second of the rupture through the bond. He is not asking. He is naming.
"I am okay."
"You are not okay."
"I am not okay. I am also not going to be okay in this building. We finish the building. Then I am not okay."
I hand him the file.
He reads the front. He reads the photocopy. His face goes the color of a man who has just understood something his body has been bracing for and the bracing was not enough.
"Crull," he says. Quiet.
"Yes."
"Get the other files. Every name in the active folder. We take them all."
"Yes."
"Dean."
"Already running."
"Harek. Fen. Status."
The earpiece. North clear. Twelve staff secured. Two armed staff down.
"Bring them. We are taking everything in this office and burning the building on the way out."
Thaw is at my elbow. The bond is wide open.
"Stay with me," he says. "We will take every file. We will find her. We will find all of them. Stay with me."
I look up at him.
I look at the file in my hand. At Hollens, M. At the photo of a woman with a freckle pattern across her nose.
The patch on my chest is pulling toward something, and the something is not in this room — the something is somewhere outside the building, somewhere the patch can feel, somewhere a woman is pregnant with biology that is half mine.
"Take everything," I say. My voice is not mine. "Burn the building. Get me out."
Chapter twenty-five
Jen
The minute we start the extraction back to the loading bay, the patch under my chest lunges — not pulls, lunges, a hard sudden jerk toward a wing of the building I have not been in — and my body answers before my brain catches up. I take three steps down a side hallway before Thaw realizes I am not at his hip anymore. He is shouting. Crull is turning. Harek and Fen are on the other side of the building moving toward the loading bay with the file duffel. Dean is at the breach point on overwatch. I am in a Syndicate hallway alone for the first time since I came out of the cell, and the patch is dragging me toward a door at the end of it.
I get to the door.
It is a cold-storage room. I can tell by the change in the air pressure when I open it — the thunk of an industrial fridgeseal, the wave of refrigerated air hitting my face, the hum of compressors. The room is white-tile and steel-shelved and it is full of small refrigerated drawers, the kind a biology lab uses.
Each drawer has a label. The labels are women's names and file numbers.
The drawer the patch is pulling me to is labeled GRIGGSON, J. — FILE 47 — DONOR ACTIVE — Q1 RETRIEVAL.
Me.
It is the cellular material they took out of me in the lab. It is in a drawer in this building. I am standing in front of it with my hand reaching for the drawer pull before I have decided what I want to do with it.
