He stares at her. His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. “You can’t shut it down. They’ll just move us.”
“No one is moving you.” She reaches for his IV line. “Hold still.”
He holds still. His eyes are wet before the needle clears his skin.
The third room. Eleven occupied. The twelfth cot is empty.
The sheet is pulled tight across the mattress. Corners tucked. Pillow centered. The IV stand retracted and clean. On the clipboard, a subject number. No body. The collection port capped and sealed.
Celeste stops at the empty cot. Three seconds. Then she moves to the first occupied bed and starts working.
The camera moves with her when she turns away. The cot leaves the frame.
One of the eleven can’t sit. A woman, face the color of the sheet beneath her. Celeste’s camera catches the monitoring unit above the cot. The numbers are low.
Celeste’s voice on comms. “Command, I’ve got one critical in room three. She needs Elena.”
“Load and move,” I say. “Elena receives on arrival.”
“Bring the wolves in,” she says. “Careful.”
Two wolves come through the door. They scan the room, the cots, the woman who can’t sit. Then the shift takes them. Bones cracking, bodies reforming. Two men stand where two wolves were, pulling sheets from the nearest empty cot and wrapping them around their waists. One of them kneels beside the woman’s bed. The other takes her IV line out, hands steady, and presses the site like Celeste did.
They lift her between them. Her head lolls against one shifter’s shoulder. Her arm trails, the IV mark on the inside of her elbow raw and dark. They carry her out slowly. Like she might not survive being put down.
The monitoring unit disconnects. The beeping stops. The silence where the beeping was is worse.
Celeste clears the first wing and enters the second. Narrower. Lower ceiling. Smaller doors.
The growth charts appear on Julian’s side. Heights tracked in inches. Ages measured in years. Developmental milestones tracked in columns with the same administrative precision as the feeding schedules in the adult wing. The same neat handwriting. The same standardized forms. A child’s growth tracked over three years. Another over five.
Celeste enters the first of the smaller rooms. Four cots. Smaller than the adult versions, with side rails. The collection system is scaled down. The IV lines thinner. The tubing runs in color-coded channels along the wall, each line labeled with a number, not a name.
Drawings on the walls. Crayon on institutional paint. A sun. Trees. A house with a door and two windows and smoke coming from a chimney.
A child is sitting cross-legged on the nearest cot, watching the door.
Celeste’s camera shakes. One tremor that runs through the frame and stops. On the audio, a sound comes out of her. Low. Involuntary. The sound she made the night she pulled Simone out of the mountain.
She stands in the doorway. Her breathing is audible. Five seconds. Six.
The mark on my chest burns. Through the bond, her grief hits me so hard my vision blurs. My throat closes. My hands grip the table edge.
Beside me, Marcellus’s hands flatten against the console surface. His shoulders pull forward.
Then her voice on comms. Stripped. Barely held together.
“Children first. Get them out now. Every vehicle we have.”
A beat. Then steadier. The command returning because it has to.
“Begin extraction. All of them. Every room. Every floor.”
Then quieter. To Alexei. “You documented this.”
A pause. His response is too quiet for the microphone to catch.
“Good. Because every lord in the vampire world is going to see it.”
