Page 45 of Monster Queen Rising

Every woman I've had my hands on this week — the ones in the seat behind me, the ones I couldn't reach. The wind drops. The clearing goes quiet the way a forest goes quiet when something large moves through it.

Behind me — I feel it before I turn, the oldest line on the field going taut — Thaw goes down to one knee on the bank.

And across every bond at once, back at the far house, I feel the rest of them feel it. Not words. Just the size of it landing — Crull's hand finding something solid, Daron's head coming up, Fen flaring hardest of all.

All of them, at once, knowing that something has changed and not yet what.

I look down at my hands. The blood is gone.

I turn around.

Thaw's on one knee, hands on his thighs, gold eyes on mine. He doesn't look down. He doesn't look away.

"There you are," he says.

Chapter sixteen

Jen

We drive home.

I'm in the passenger seat. The slate has gone back down — sometime on the dirt road back, between the river and the road, the apex eased itself back under my skin the way the shift eases under Fen's. My hands are just hands again. My face in the side mirror is just my face. But something stayed. The bonds don't feel like six separate pulls anymore. They feel like one field with me at the center of it, and the center holds whether I'm thinking about it or not.

I don't have a word for it and I'm too tired to go looking for one. I let it sit.

"How's Madison," I say. I haven’t see her in days. Whatever's happened at home happened without me.

Thaw's quiet a second, and then something at the corner of his mouth moves that isn't quite a smile.

"She's got an app on her phone," he says.

"An app."

"A pregnancy app. You put in how far along you are and it tells you what's happening that week. What the baby's the size of. What to expect." His eyes stay on the road. "A plum. A cantaloupe. A — I don't know. Some fruit."

"Okay."

"It usually gives one update a week. She's reading one every day." He glances at me. "She's a week further along every morning than she was the night before. The app doesn't have a setting for that."

It takes me a second.

"So she reads the week it gives her," he says, "then goes downstairs and asks Vance what comes next."

I turn in my seat.

"She's interrogating Vance."

"Every day. Takes the app down with her. Holds up the phone. Says, this says my baby should be doing this, and I know it's already past that, so tell me what mine is actually doing." His hand is easy on the wheel. "Vance answers her. She doesn't answer any of us like that. Madison she answers, because Madison doesn't stop."

I sit with that. Madison — down in a basement every morning, making the woman who designed the thing inside her account for it line by line.

"Good," I say.

"She's not waiting for anybody to tell her what's happening to her. She's going and getting it." Thaw glances over. "You'd like it. It's what you'd do."

"How is she really? Besides the app."

"Scared. Tired. Getting bigger faster than a person's supposed to and feeling all of it." He says it plain. "But she's up on her feet and she's asking the right questions and she made Harek reorganize the whole kitchen so she can reach things. She's alright. She's managing."