Page 63 of Monster Queen Rising

"I've got her," she says. Not to me. To Harek. "Go get your bag."

He goes.

The dog's come up off his bed and gone to the foot of the stairs. He doesn't bark. He sits down and looks up and waits.

I do the math standing there with my hand on the back of a chair. Three weeks, Vance said. Cuffed, in that basement, with Madison holding the phone up at her.

It's time.

Upstairs, she breathes through another one, and she doesn't call for anyone.

I stand.

Chapter twenty-three

Jen

I take the stairs two at a time and I can hear her before I'm at the top.

Not a scream. A sound low in the chest, long, working through something, and it cuts off in the middle like a door shut on it.

Janet's got the door open. She's got her sleeves up and her hand on Madison's back and she doesn't look around at me.

"Good," she says. "Get on her other side."

Madison's on her feet with one hand on the footboard, folded forward over the other one, her nightshirt stuck to her back. Her hair's wet at the hairline. When it lets go of her she comes up and her eyes find me and there's nothing careful left in her face.

"Since ten," she says. "I thought I could do it by myself."

"How's that going?"

"Badly." Her hand comes off the footboard and clamps on my arm. "Don't go anywhere."

"I'm not going anywhere."

She grips hard enough that I feel it in the bone.

Harek's in with the kit, his calm presence helping already. He gets a hand low on her back.

"How far apart?"

"Two minutes. Less." She says. "It's speeding up. It's been speeding up since it started and it's not supposed to. First ones are slow. Every book says first ones are slow."

"You're not in any book," Harek says. Even. Not soft. "Nobody's had this kind the natural way. You're the first one there's ever been. It's going to do things the book doesn't have."

She breathes. It's coming again.

The contraction takes her. Two of three primates lived. Vance said that to her face.

Janet's got her from the other side, talking to her low, steady, the whole time —there you go, that's it, ride it out, don't fight the top of it— the same voice that's probably talked forty ninth-graders through a fire drill, and it works, because it doesn't care that any of this is impossible.

When Madison surfaces she's gray.

"The woman who built this is in the basement," she says.

"She is. Thaw's on her. I can have her up those stairs in ninety seconds." A pause. "Your call. It stays your call."

"No."