Page 52 of Monster Queen Rising

"Why?"

"Because this is evil. I heard the last one. Through the wall. She was twenty-two and I heard what they did to her, and I have a daughter."

I don't move for a moment. "I want Linden."

"Residence. South building. Hasn't been in this wing since yesterday morning."

"Data."

"Hard drives, cabinet behind the desk in the analysis room. Biometric — Linden's print only. Or you destroy it."

"Samples."

"Cold storage, basement, below the wing. Keycard access." She holds out her hand with a keycard. "I have it."

I take it. "Stay in the building until we're clear. Hide in your office. Don't come out until you hear the guards waking up."

We move.

The analysis room is at the end of the corridor, door closed. I stop at it, the keycard in my pocket, Park's information in my head: Linden's in the residence. Linden is not in this room. The drives are.

I put my hand on the door. The voice sits in my throat. Crull nods.

I open it.

The room is bigger than I expected. White walls, a long steel table down the middle, monitors above it dark, a cabinet wall at the far end — steel, biometric reader on the panel. Empty.

We step in. Crull scans the corners, the closet, the supply nook. Then he goes still, his head turning to the doorway we came through, nostrils flaring, amber narrowing.

"Someone's close."

"Where?"

"Don't know yet. Not in this room."

I push it down and cross to the cabinet. The reader's a black square at chest height. I put my hand on it. Nothing — Linden's print only. I step back.

There's a chair pulled out from the table at an angle that says someone got up and didn't push it in. The papers are face-down. Someone was here within the hour.

Then a door — not in the room, in the corridor — opens, and the air Crull's been holding in his chest changes.

"Two," he says, low.

I lift my hand. He stops.

"Let them come."

She steps into the doorway. Sixties, gray hair pulled back, glasses on a chain, a lab coat over a dark sweater, hands empty. A step back and to the side is the man Crull smelled — big, still, not afraid, a sidearm out low, muzzle at the floor in a way that says he can raise it faster than I can do anything about it. Flat eyes. There's something in his ears. Two small matte units, one in each. Not comms — the wrong shape, sealed against the canal. Built for me.

She doesn't look at Crull or at the man. She looks at me.

"Jen." She says it the way you say the name of a problem child. She's not afraid. "Four sites. And now here."

I hold the voice in my throat and let her say whatever she came down here to say.

She reads me and doesn’t seem surprised.

"You're not going to stop me." A small tip of her head toward the man with the units in his ears. "Wouldn't work on him. I had those made after Theresa. For you."