"And the rest of it." Dean's hand moves, takes in the medical panel, the bench. "We didn't know who else was in there. What condition. Whether they'd come out shot, or cut, or — used. So we built a place to patch people up." His eyes come back to me. "And we didn't know about you at all. But we knew whoever we pulled out of a place like that might come out of it with nothing. So."
He bends. Under the bench there is a duffel, and he pulls it open, and he takes out a folded stack and holds it out to me across the dark.
Clothes.
Real clothes. Soft, dark, folded — a sweatshirt, pants, socks rolled into a ball on top. The kind of thing a person owns. I have been in a torn hospital gown since a lab tech cut my running clothes off me in pieces.
I take the clothes.
My hands are not steady.
"It's not a cell," Dean says. "I need you to hear that. It was never a cell. It was the worst thing we were willing to be ready for."
I look at the mesh partition one more time. The rings. The straps.
And it is still a cell.
But the twins drove a cell up a mountain and the whole way up they wanted, more than anything, to drive it back down empty.
"Okay," I say.
We load fast after that.
Thaw lifts me up into the forward section and I pull the clothes on right there in the dark, in front of all of them. The sweatshirt is too big. It smells like nothing, like detergent, and I push my face into the fabric of it for one second and breathe.
Crull comes up into the box with Fen still over his shoulder.
Fen goes in the back section.
Because Fen is the most feral male in this truck — sedation thinning, claws out, a body that does not know us — and the small reinforced section behind the steel mesh is the only place in the world right now where he can ride down a mountain road without being a danger to the people who love him.
I hate it. I hate it with everything I have, and I cannot argue with a single part of it.
Crull carries him through the gap in the mesh and lays him down on a folded blanket. Crull does not strap him.
He looks at the restraint rings. He looks at Fen.
He does not use them.
He lays Fen down loose, on the blanket, and he stays crouched with one hand flat on Fen's chest and he says — to Thaw, not to me — "I ride back here."
"Crull —"
"I ride back here." The rumble does not stop under the words. "He does not wake up alone in a locked box. Not him. Not ever again."
Thaw looks at him for a long moment.
Then he nods, and Crull settles himself in the back section with Fen, on the wrong side of the mesh, in the cell, by choice.
The cargo door rolls down.
The dark goes total for a second before someone finds a battery lantern clipped to the wall and the box fills with lowyellow light. Up front, I hear a cab door slam. The engine turns over. The truck lurches into motion.
Nobody says much.
After the alarms and the gunfire and the sprint through the forest, the quiet feels strange.
I sit between Thaw and Harek and let my head fall back against the wall.
