"You are too quiet."
"I am driving."
"You have been driving for twenty minutes and you have not looked at me once."
His eyes find mine in the rearview.
"I am giving you a minute," Dean says. "I have been around shifters my whole life. I do not have questions for what you just did. I will. But not yet."
"Okay."
He looks at the rearview a beat longer. Then back at the road.
We are forty minutes out from the third cache when Dean's radio lights up.
He goes still at the wheel. Thaw turns.
"What?" Thaw says.
"Daron is on a frequency we monitor," Dean says. Slow. "Syndicate internal. They are talking to each other in real time. He is recording."
"What are they saying?"
Dean lifts a finger. He is listening.
His face goes blank.
"Pull off," Thaw says.
"There is no pull-off for two miles."
"At the two miles, pull off."
Dean drives the two miles.
The truck rolls into a forest-service spur and Dean kills the engine and the silence of the canyon comes up around us. Crull's truck pulls in behind us. The radio is on Dean's belt. Daron is in the cab of the other truck with his own radio, and the two wolves are listening to the same frequency.
Dean unclips his radio. He turns the volume up. He hands it across the cab to Thaw. Thaw puts it to his ear.
His face does not change.
He listens for thirty seconds.
He hands the radio back to Dean.
He looks at me.
"Jen," he says. Quiet. The careful is gone. What is in his voice now is the alpha making sure I am sitting down before he says the next thing. "There are two transmissions. They are talking toeach other across networks. I want you to hear both of them. In order."
"Okay."
Dean reroutes the audio through the truck's small speaker. The volume is low. The canyon outside is silent. The pack is silent. The audio-feed comes through the cab in a man's flat voice, the kind of voice a comms officer uses, and what it says is a Syndicate internal message broadcast on a frequency the twins have apparently been monitoring for a year:
All regional teams stand by. Phase Two has been authorized. Acquisition windows on the following names are open as of zero-four-hundred local. Begin retrieval operations on all listed candidates. Twenty-three names. Pacific Northwest priority. End transmission.
The cab is silent.
I do not have to ask. I know what the twenty-three names are. The twenty-three other ACTIVE women on the registry. The Syndicate has just authorized the mass retrieval of every other compatible woman they have on file, and they have authorized it as of four o'clock this morning, which is — I do the math — twenty minutes after we burned Site Theresa to the ground.
