Page 32 of Monster Queen Rising

Her hands go white on the duffel. "Use me how."

"Take an egg, fertilize it with stored material, put it back, keep you in a facility for the term. It isn't a normal pregnancy. The hybrid carries six weeks, start to finish — and they have a way to crush even that into four days."

"Four days." She shakes her head once. "That isn't possible."

"It is. They have a protocol and it works. Barely. Most of the women don't survive it. Most of the children don't either."

She doesn't ask for the count. I watch her get there on her own — the nurse in her running the arithmetic of forty years and almost nothing to show for it — and her face changes.

Her hand goes over her mouth.

"Stop," she says, through it. "Just — wait."

I stop.

She looks at the floor of the truck, breathing through her hand, eyes shut. I don't say anything. Daron doesn't check the rearview. The only sound in the cab is her breath against her own palm.

She holds it a long time. Then she lowers her hand.

"Keep going."

"They got further with another woman than they got with you. Madison. The pregnancy's in her body now. They put her on the four-day protocol two days ago — last night we got her off it. There's a drug that shuts the acceleration down and drops her back to the normal rate.”

I laugh at myself. At the absurdity of thinking 6 weeks is the “normal” time for a pregnancy now.

“Six weeks instead of four days. She has about three weeks left, and she chose that herself."

"She's alive."

"Alive. Angry. Twenty-six, a teacher, making her own calls about her own body."

Elma shuts her eyes again.

"I'm a nurse. I've done OB rotations. The placenta needs time. The cardiac load builds week by week. The vascular system accommodates over months, because months is what it has. I don't understand how anything finishes in four days without killing her."

"We don't know either. We have the doctor who ran her site in custody — Vance, the one who built the protocol. We're getting it out of her."

The dark eyes go wider than they've been the whole drive.

"You kidnapped a doctor”"

"Held against her will. Alive. Treated decently. She's going to tell us everything she knows, because her alternative is worse."

"Worse how."

"I won't lie to you. She's in the basement of a property with my pack in it. The men I'm with are dangerous. She's alive because we've decided she's more useful that way."

Elma laughs once. It isn't a laugh. It's the sound a body makes when it's been handed more than it can hold in fifteen minutes.

"I don't know what's happening. I'm in the middle of something . . . I just got in a truck with strangers." She shuts her eyes. "I want all of it. Now, while I'm in this truck and I can't leave. I want to hear it at once and deal with it after. Keep going."

"Okay." The men in the program weren't asked either, I tell her — the Syndicate's been collecting genetic material from hybrid males for decades. The one whose material may have gone into you is in our group. He was in a cell. We all escaped last month.

She breathes out hard, both hands on the duffel, holding it like it's the only solid thing in the cab.

"What does hybrid male mean?"

"He isn't entirely human. The program's been studying him for years."