Page 55 of Monster Queen Rising

She doesn't.

"Almost perfect," she says, quiet, and lets her head rest back against the frame. Grading it. Then her eyes sharpen and go somewhere — inward, calculating.

I hear Fen at the doorway and Linden continues.

"The carrier's still viable," she says. "Hollens. The child's what — a few days out? Or was she already born?" She isn't asking me. She's asking the file in her head. "Yours and his. The uncontrollable thing and the subject we couldn't break." Something comes into her voice that's almost longing, and that's the part that turns my stomach, because it's real. "I would have given the rest of my life to see what that child is. Whether it takes. Whether you can orderitto do anything." Her eyes come back to my face, lit. "That child is the most valuable unanswered question on the continent now." A small, terrible tilt of her head. "You didn't end anything here. You made something they'll spend the next forty years trying to open."

I don't answer her. My hand's tightened on Crull's wound without my telling it to, and the room's gone cold.

Fen grunts.

The shift's up in him from the threat, dark down his arms, eyes gone red-and-gold. His eyes go to Crull on the floor with my hand packed to his shoulder. To the far wall, and what's against it. To me.

They stop on me. Recognition. The same thing Thaw said on the riverbank, without a word, down the line.

"Crull," he says, and crosses to him, drops to his other side.

Linden watches Fen come, her eyes tracking him with the same clinical hunger, something else banking under it seeing him close.

"Vex," she says softly. "That one should not be standing on his own feet. We took him apart twice." Almost to herself.

Fen doesn't give her his eyes. I watch him keep them off her on purpose — a door held shut — because if he looks at her now, over Crull's blood, it happens now, and there's a bleeding man.

"The cabinet," he says to me. Level. "We don't have long."

The drives are still in there. The list. All of it — the enforcer never got to burn it.

I get Linden up off the floor and over to the reader and press her hand to it. The cabinet opens. Hard drives racked unlabeled. I pull a bag from my jacket and slot each one and don't let my hands shake until they're all in and it's slung across me.

I set her back down. She lets me, watching with that tilted calm.

"Can you command your mates?," she asks. "Have you tried it yet?"

I don't spend a word on her.

Crull's up — Fen got him standing while I worked the cabinet, the shoulder packed, gray but on his feet, leaning into Fen's side.

"Get him to the truck," I tell Fen. "I've got the drives. Go."

He doesn't move.

He's looking at her now. He's let himself, finally — the door he kept shut the whole time, open now, because Crull's standing and the bag's on my body. Fen's dark eyes are on Linden on the floor, and the thing in his face isn't the shift. It's the man underneath it, gone very quiet and very certain.

Crull feels it through him. He straightens off Fen's side, taking his own weight, freeing him. "I can stand," Crull says, low, and sets his good shoulder to the frame, and holds himself up so Fen doesn't have to.

Nobody says what it is. Everybody in the room knows.

She ran the program that took him apart. She ran it for years. She just put her clinical hunger on his unborn daughter and named the child a target the world will hunt. And we are not walking out of this building and leaving her alive to do one more day of it.

I want it. My hands are already red — I'd do it myself and not lose a night's sleep, for Crull, for the baby.

I look at Fen instead.

I don't say a word. I step back, and I let a free man choose.

Linden watches him come. She doesn't beg. To the last she's studying it — the subject she caged, the asset she filed, standing up out of all of it on his own feet and choosing, by himself, what happens to her. Her eyes flick to me once.

"You won't even take my death," she says to me. Wondering. The last data point. "You could. You want to. And you'll hand it to him instead." Almost a smile. "We really couldn't have built you. Not in a hundred years."