Page 15 of Monster Queen Rising

The vault door at the end is metal, industrial, six feet of it, a keypad with a red light. I key in the code Dean pulled off Vance. Eight, four, seven, seven, one, two.

The light goes green. The door unseals — half hiss, half mechanism — and the air that rolls out is colder than the corridor by thirty degrees.

The patch spikes.

Harek sets his back to the corridor and takes the door. Thaw goes in first. Fen comes in behind me.

I know this room.

Well not this one exactly. The one at Theresa — white tile, steel shelves, the compressor hum you feel in your teeth, drawers with women's names on them. I stood in that one a few hours ago and opened a drawer with my own name on it and pulled out what was inside, and I told myself I had taken it back.

This one is bigger.

Floor to ceiling down both walls, refrigerated cabinets, glass-fronted, forty-eight on the left and forty-eight on the right. Behind the glass, racks of vials, hundreds to a rack, and frost has bloomed white along the seam of every door, so the labels read like they are under ice. The compressors run under everything, low, a sound I feel in my back teeth.

The cabinets at the far end are older. Yellowed paint, older glass.

I took six vials out of a room like this before dawn and put them in my coat and told myself it was done. It wasn't.

There is a workstation on the center wall. A terminal, a printer, a rolling desk stacked with paper. The directory is right there on the desk, printed, the same letterhead as Madison's chart.

Thaw reads over my shoulder.

Women first. Subject numbers from the low hundreds up into the seven hundreds. Eggs, embryos, processed material. Forty years of registry women, most of them failures, a few of them not.

My line is in there. Griggson, Jennifer L. Subject Forty-Seven. There is more of me on this list than I carried out of Theresa.

I read past it.

Two lines up, Hollens, Madison. Cohort B-7. My line, Madison's line, the men's lines — every one of us in this room, catalogued, before any of us knew the others were alive.

Then the men. They are at the bottom of the list, and they go back years.

Subject Fen. 11/14/23 to present. Subject Thaw. 06/08/20 to present. Subject Crull. 03/22/21 to present. Subject Harek. 08/04/19 to present.

Present.

Every one of them.

They were still drawing it before our escape.

They weren't experiments. That is the word I keep reaching for and it is the wrong word. Experiments end. These are line items. And nobody ever meant it to stop.

Harek since two thousand nineteen.

I glance back at him. He is at the door, watching the corridor, and his hand has closed at his side, slow, until the claws are in his own palm. He does not seem to know he is doing it.

Thaw takes the directory off the desk. He is looking at his own line.

"Fucking years."

Then nothing, for a while.

"June." Flat. "I'd been running with them two years by then. I thought I had a contract."

He sets the paper down. Flattens his palm on it like he can hold it still.

"They paid me to run their operations." A breath. "And drew this off me the whole time. Both sides of the ledger. Billed the missions, kept the rest."