Page 16 of Monster Queen Rising

His jaw works once.

"Crull doesn't know yet."

Crull is out at the loading dock with Vance and the reversal, and his line is on this list too, three up from Thaw's. I am not putting it over the radio. He gets to hear it from one of us, out of this building, with room to put his fist through something that isn't a wall we still need.

"He will when we tell him," I say.

Thaw turns to the cabinet nearest us. R-13. His.

"Open it."

"Why?"

"I want to see what they have."

I open it. The interior light comes up. Shelves by year, 2019 at the bottom, each year its own rack of finger-length vials. He takes it in and touches nothing.

"Hundred-some of me in one cabinet," he says. "And they still sent me out between."

I close it.

Fen is at the far wall.

He has gone small again — wings tight, the lines down his neck dark and still.

His cabinet is racked like the rest. Oldest at the back, newest at the front — three vials drawn in the last six weeks, before we pulled him out of the cell at the breach. Years of him, sorted front to back by date, like stock that came in on a schedule.

Because it did.

He puts his palm flat on the glass. The air around him flexes once, there and gone. He holds his hand there. His print fogs the glass, right over the three vials at the front.

He takes his hand away. He doesn't say anything.

We can't carry all of this. Not the volume—hundreds of racks, ninety-six cabinets, forty years. We can carry paper. The directory. The records off the desk.

The rest, I'm going to burn.

An Emergency Thermal Purge panel is mounted on the back wall behind a locked metal cover.

Instructions are bolted beside it in plain black lettering.

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY – ARCHIVE DESTRUCTION PROTOCOL

The key from the man in the corridor fits. I enter the facility code Vance gave Dean.

THERMAL PURGE AUTHORIZED.

The system asks for a countdown. Five minutes by default. I cut it to thirty seconds.

Thaw hugs the records against his chest—the directory, a binder of quarterly reports.

He has what matters.

I look at Fen. He's still standing at the cabinet with his name, the three vials lined up in front of him.

"Say the word."

His eyes linger on the cabinet. Then they lift to mine.