Page 70 of Monster Queen Rising

The rumble starts in his chest. Low. Continuous. Aimed at nobody, carrying nobody out of anywhere. Just his, in the dark, with nowhere to send it.

He sleeps.

Chapter twenty-five

Jen

Dean puts the laptop down on the registry and says the thing he's been carrying up the drive.

"Sarah Klein's dead."

The kitchen stops. Crull's hands go still in the dough. Daron looks up from the map.

"Three weeks ago. Maybe four." Dean doesn't sit down. "Reno PD found a body in a rental east of the city in April and it's been sitting in a county system since, and I only found it because I stopped looking for Sarah Klein and started looking for Jane Does." A breath. "It's her."

Nobody says anything.

"I told you." He's looking at me. "At the rest stop, with the coffee. I said we don't have her, we have where she is, and that's not the same as gone." His jaw works once. "It was the same asgone. It had already been the same as gone for a week when I said it."

"Dean."

"I want it read out. Not filed." He puts two fingers on the page. "Sarah Klein. Twenty-nine. Lab tech, Reno. We knew her name for eleven days."

So I read it. All of it. Daron gets up and stands behind his brother's chair and puts a hand on the back of his neck and leaves it there. Crull washes the dough off his hands and comes and stands at the table and doesn't say a word, because there isn't one, and standing there is the whole thing he does.

Thaw crosses her name off.

"That's two," he says.

Two. Mary Wylie and Sarah Klein.

I'd have carried that alone a month ago. I'd have taken it up to a room and not come down and let everybody in this house feel it through the floor and called that carrying my own weight. Harek sat across this table three weeks ago and told me the pack was the everything, and I said I'd stop, and stopping looks like this. The four of them around the table. Me not the only one who knows.

It doesn't hurt less.

It just isn't mine by myself.

Twenty-three names came out of Linden's cabinet.

One of them is mine.

Fifteen of them have been saved. Two of them here — Mara at the table with her camera, Janet upstairs. More went to their own people, the way Ana Choi went to a porch light in Montana at four in the morning and a sister who was running down the steps before the truck stopped. Two took the file we gave them and walked and told us not to follow, and we haven't.

Two dead.

Two unaccounted. Names on a page. No location, no status, no contact, nothing to work with but the fact that nobody's found their bodies either.

The work isn't done.

I close the registry.

Out the window, Crull's got a string line across the flat part of the yard and the twins are arguing over it, and there's a pallet of lumber where the equipment lean-to used to be.

Daron catches me looking.

"It's a bunkhouse," he says.

Thaw comes in off the porch at noon.