Chapter 6: The Donor Wing
The first of the orderlies arrived before the last of the creatures had finished settling. Amber was the first to be unstrapped, and she came off the table with a grin she could not quite control, one hand pressed to her sternum where the new weight of her passenger sat behind bone. She made a joke about feeling like she had swallowed a live grenade and been told to keep walking. Jasmine did not joke. She sat up slowly, dark hair spilling across her shoulders, and looked down at her own midriff with the expression of a scientist confirming a theory she had hoped, privately, to disprove. Lydia was quietest of all. She let the orderly wrap a thin blanket around her shoulders and she thanked him, and when she passed Becca she reached out and squeezed Becca's fingers once, briefly, as if to say it had been done.
Vance wrote steadily in his notebook while they were led out. Three pairs of soft footsteps receded down the corridor, then the door sealed with a hydraulic sigh, and the room was left to the hum of the tanks and the three of them.
Chloe had not let go of Becca's hand. Their fingers were still laced, and Becca noticed that the humming in her own belly had changed pitch, a lower, slower note than before, as though the creature was listening to something she could not hear.
"That went better than I had any right to expect," Vance said, capping his pen. "Three bonds. Three viable lineages, assuming the gestation holds." He glanced at the tank, now empty, its interior lights dimming to a soft blue. "I'll want each of them scanned within the hour. But first, there's something I need you both to see."
Becca's shoulders tensed. She had learned to read the shape of Vance's sentences over the past week, and the ones that began with something I need you to see never ended anywhere pleasant.
"Now?" Chloe asked.
"Now," said Vance. He was already moving toward the far door, the one Becca had assumed led to storage.
The donor wing was deeper than she had imagined. The corridor sloped gently downward, and the lights overhead thinned until each fixture seemed to be rationing itself, pools of pale illumination separated by long stretches of shadow. Their footsteps echoed. The air grew cooler, and then colder, and Becca pulled the collar of her hoodie up around her neck, which did nothing for her bare legs under the hospital-issue shorts that were all that fit her anymore.
"Julian," Chloe said, and Vance did not correct her for the familiarity. "Is this the part where you tell us what's in the basement?"
"Something like that."
The door at the end of the corridor was heavier than the others. Vance pressed his palm to a plate and leaned his weight into the handle, and the door groaned open onto a chamber that made Becca stop in her tracks.
It was a vault, or had been built to look like one. The ceiling arched high overhead into a darkness that swallowed the light before it could reach. The floor was black stone, polished so thoroughly that the tanks seemed to float above their own reflections, doubling and redoubling into the depths. And the tanks themselves ringed the room in a slow curve, each one a tall column of faintly luminous fluid, each one occupied.
Becca counted four before she stopped counting. She had expected the containers to be like the ones in Lab Zero, functional and small, but these were the height of a person and then some, and the fluid inside them moved with a slow internal current that was not mechanical. It pulsed. In unison. A quiet, deliberate rhythm, as if the whole chamber were breathing.
The first three tanks held creatures like the ones Becca carried, small-bodied, bulbous, their tentacles gathered beneath them in patient knots. Their lights were dim and steady.
The fourth tank was different.
The creature inside it filled most of the column. Where the others were the size of a melon, this one was the length of Becca's forearm and thicker than her thigh, its body elongated into a trailing whiptail that coiled lazily through the fluid. Its tentacles were long, far longer than they should have been, hanging almost to the floor of its tank and drifting there like kelp in a slow tide. Its bioluminescence was not the soft blue-green of the others but a deep, arterial red, and it throbbed rather than pulsed, an uneven, agitated rhythm that put Becca in mind of a heartbeat after a hard run.
She did not realize she had stepped closer until the glass was a foot from her face.
The creature's eyes opened.
There were more than two. Becca counted four along its mantle, then two more set lower, near the root of the tentacles, each a pale, milky gold. And every one of them fixed on her. Not on Chloe, who stood a half step behind, not on Vance, who had stopped at a console near the door and was watching them with his arms folded. On her. On the swell of her belly under the hoodie that no longer fit.
The creature drifted forward until its face pressed against the inside of the glass, and its tentacles uncoiled and spread across the curve of the tank, splaying wide, as if it were reaching for her.
Chloe made a small sound. "Oh."
"Yeah," Becca said. Her voice came out thinner than she intended.
Vance spoke from the doorway. "We call this one the fourth donor. It was recovered in the same descent as the others, but it's a different caste. Larger, older, we think, though the Xanthari don't seem to age the way we do. It has refused every host we've offered it."
"How many?" Chloe asked.
"Twelve," Vance said. "Every woman in the program who passed screening. It looked at each of them and turned away. We assumed it was dying, or sterile, or simply defective. We stopped offering it candidates weeks ago." He paused. "It has never reacted to anyone the way it is reacting to Becca now."
The creature's tentacles pressed flat against the glass, and Becca thought she could feel the vibration of them through the floor, a low drumming that seemed to sync with the humming in her own belly and then drown it out. Her creature shifted inside her, restive, turning.
Chloe took Becca's hand again, tighter this time. "It wants the eggs."
"That's one interpretation," Vance said. "It's also possible it only recognizes another bonded host and prefers the company. We genuinely don't know. There's no precedent. This caste was never documented as a reproductive vector. It may not even be capable of contributing genetic material."
But Becca was not listening to Vance. She was listening to the tune the creature was drumming into the glass, and to the answering flutter beneath her ribs, and she knew, with the same blunt certainty that had arrived the first morning her belly had swelled overnight, that Vance was wrong about the thing's purpose. It did not want the company. It wanted what she was carrying, and it was willing to wait, and it had been waiting for a long time, through twelve refusals, for the right one to walk into its room.
She stepped up to the tank. The glass was cold under her palm. On the other side, the creature lifted one long tentacle and laid it against the spot where her hand rested, the fluids of the tank distorting it, so that for a moment it looked like they were touching.
Behind her, Chloe said her name. Vance said something about protocols.
Becca did not answer either of them. She stood there, belly to the glass, and looked into the milky gold eyes that had chosen her before she had ever been given a choice, and the creature looked back with an attention that felt almost like hunger, and almost like grief, and she could not decide which one frightened her more.
Then her creature moved.
It was not the slow, restive turning she had grown used to over the past days, the gentle rearrangement that came with the creature's sleep. This was a lurch. A whole-bodied thrust against the inside of her, upward and forward, so that the taut skin above her navel went tight and then tighter, and Becca gasped and pressed both hands flat against her belly as if she could hold something in. The hum inside her changed key. It climbed, thin and bright, and the tank answered it, the red light beating faster, the creature's tentacles slapping wet against the glass in a rhythm that was not random.
It was a call. She understood that the way she understood the weight of her own body, without argument, without words. Something in her was answering something out there, and whatever it was, it had nothing to do with her.
"That," she said, and her voice came out scraped. "That's new."
Chloe's hand was at her elbow. "What is it doing?"
"I don't know." Becca took a step back. Her heels caught the hem of nothing, and she staggered a half-pace, both hands still cradling the swell, and the creature in the tank came with her. It drifted to the edge of its column and stayed there, tentacles trailing across the curve of the glass in the direction she had moved, every eye still pinned to the place her hands were covering. She took another step. It did not lose her. She went sideways along the row, past the three dim tanks, and the creature turned in its column to follow, slow and patient, a body tracking her the way a needle tracks a magnet.
Vance had not moved from his console. He was watching with an expression Becca had not seen on him before, something flat and hungry under the tiredness, the look of a man who has been handed a data point he has spent years waiting for.
"Julian," she said. "What does it want from me?"
"You already know what it wants."
"Say it anyway."
He uncrossed his arms and came forward, and his shoes rang on the black stone, and he stopped a respectful distance from her, as though she had become something that might do damage. "It wants proximity to your eggs," he said. "Whether it wants to fertilize them, alter them, or consume them, I can't tell you. That's the honest answer, and it's the only one I have. The fourth donor's caste was never observed in a reproductive context. We have no field data. We have a tank, and twelve women it looked at and dismissed, and now you."
The creature in the tank had stopped at the angle nearest her and settled, its whiptail coiled under it, its tentacles spread wide against the glass as though it were trying to cover as much of her field of view as possible. It did not blink. Its milky eyes did not move from her belly. The red light beat slow and even now, steadier than before, as if it had gotten what it wanted and was content to wait for the rest.
Becca's creature had quieted the moment she stepped back. That was the detail she kept coming back to. It had thrown itself at the walls of her, and now it was calm, soothed by distance, or satisfied. As if it had answered a familiar voice across a crowded room and could go back to its drink now that the greeting had been returned.
"It knows mine," she said.
"What?"
"The thing in me. It recognized that one." She gestured at the tank without turning her head, because she did not want to look away from it, and she did not want to admit to herself why. "They know each other. Or it knows what's inside me. Either way, that's not a stranger in there. That's something that's been looking for this."
Chloe made a small, unhappy noise. "Becca, you're not seriously thinking about this."
"I'm not thinking about anything. I'm standing in a basement." But her hand had come up without her permission and rested again on the cold glass, and the creature pressed its long tentacle to the other side of that spot, and the rhythm of the red light sped up once, twice, then settled.
Vance cleared his throat. "I'll be direct with you, because I think you'd prefer it. The program is failing. You and Chloe are carrying the last viable generation this facility will produce. The first three donors should hold, but even if all five of you deliver successfully, that's a handful of hatchlings against an extinction curve that's already past the point of recovery." He looked at the tank, then at her, and his face was as tired and as bloodless as it had been the first morning she had woken strapped to his table. "I brought you down here because I had a hunch. I've had it since the day your scan came back with fourteen instead of two. The fourth donor has never once looked at a host. It looked at you before you crossed the room."
"So you want me to carry that one too."
"I want to know what it does. What it is. Whether it can be used, or whether it's a dead end I need to write off before it wastes the last of our budget." He paused, and something shifted behind his eyes, and Becca realized with a dull, sinking certainty that he was deciding how much to tell her. "It's a different caste, Becca. We don't know what a successful bond would produce. It could be nothing. It could be everything. I can't promise you an outcome. I can only promise you the truth of what we have, and what we have is that it chose you."
Chloe stepped in front of her, shoulder angled, as if her thin frame could block a tank. "You said yourself it might not even be able to breed."
"I said it might not be a reproductive vector. I didn't say it wasn't designed for something else."
"Which is what?"
"I don't know," Vance said, and for once he did not sound like a man who had an answer he was withholding. He sounded like a man at the bottom of a very deep hole. "That's why I'm asking her instead of ordering her."
Becca looked past Chloe's shoulder at the thing in the fluid. It had not looked at Chloe once. It had not looked at Vance. It looked at her with six steady eyes and spread its tentacles, and the red light pulsed, and her own creature lay quiet and content inside her like a dog that had heard its name.
She took her hand off the glass.
"What do you want from me, Julian?" she said. "Say it plain. No protocols, no consent forms, no maybe. You asked me down here for a reason. What is it."
Vance was quiet for a long moment. The tanks hummed around them, four columns of slow-moving light in a room that had been designed for no one to ever stand in comfortably.
"What are you willing to do?" he said. "That's the question. Not what I want. I already know what I want. I want the Xanthari to survive, and I'll burn every protocol in this building to see it. So I'll ask it the way I should have asked it an hour ago, before I brought you down here and showed you this." He nodded at the tank. "What are you willing to do, Becca?"
The creature pressed a tentacle against the glass where her hand had been, and held it there, waiting.
Becca did not move her hand. She let it rest on the swell under her hoodie, palm flat, the way she had come to do without thinking over the past days, as if the weight needed steadying or reassurance. The fabric was warm. Beneath it, her creature was still quiet, coiled and listening, a low tide in her gut.
She rubbed small circles there, the way she would have rubbed the belly of a cat that had settled on her lap. The question sat in the cold air of the vault like a third person in the room, and she turned it over the way she turned over a bad design brief, looking for the angle where it stopped making sense.
"I've already done a lot," she said. Not to Vance, exactly. To the room. To the black stone and the four columns of light. "I let him put a thing in me that I couldn't see. I let them strap me down. I woke up with a belly full of eggs and no way to explain any of it to anyone outside these walls. I told a woman I loved her in an apartment with bad water pressure and a creature humming in my chest." She laughed, once, without much feeling in it. "I've signed more consent forms than I've signed anything else in my life. At some point you stop counting the steps and start counting the distance."
She looked down at herself. Fourteen eggs she was carrying for a race she had never met, for a species she could not picture except as a squid in a mason jar. Her grandmother's apartment was sitting empty on the other side of the country, mail piling up behind the door, and if she got out of here alive she would still be exactly the same person, a gamer with a degree she wasn't using and a body that strangers had opinions about.
"And the thing is," she said, "that's not even the part that bothers me. The part that bothers me is that I could say no right now. He said he was asking. Nobody has actually asked me anything since I got here." She glanced at Vance. "You could have just put me under and told me afterward. You didn't."
"Would that have been better?" Vance asked.
"No. It would have been easier." She rubbed her belly again. The creature inside her shifted, a slow roll under the surface, and she felt it lean toward the glass, toward the tank, drawn like a compass needle with no choice in the matter. Her skin prickled where it pressed. "It's doing it again," she said quietly. "Pulling."
Chloe's hand found her arm, fingers curling tight around the sleeve of her hoodie. "Becca."
"I know."
"I'm serious. It refused twelve women. It's a different caste. Julian just told you he doesn't know what it would do to you." Chloe's voice was calm in the way a hand on a hot stove is not calm at all. "You've already got fourteen. That's already more than anyone. You don't have to be the one who finds out whether this thing is a monster."
"No," Becca said. "I don't."
The creature in the tank pressed both of its longest tentacles flat and spread them apart, exposing a darker hollow along its underside, a cavity that pulsed with the same red light, and Becca understood, without being told, that it was showing her something. An opening. An offer. It had not looked away from her once, and it had not looked at Chloe at all, and there was something terrible and pitiable in the single-mindedness of it, the way it had waited in the dark for something it could not name.
She thought about the first three women on the tables an hour ago, the way Lydia had squeezed her fingers on the way out. She thought about Chloe's belly, eleven eggs, the two of them swelling together in an apartment with one working lamp. She thought about a species she would never see, drifting in a burning sky, sending out its last pieces to find a place to land.
She thought, and the thinking did not take long, because it had already been done.
"Julian," she said, and she looked at him directly, both feet planted, her hand still cradling the swell. "I'll do what needs to be done. Whatever that turns out to be."
Chloe made a sound behind her, sharp and unhappy, but did not pull her hand away.
Vance did not smile. He did not thank her. He nodded once, a small, tight movement, and turned to the console beside the door, and Becca was grateful for that, because a thank you would have made it a transaction and a nod made it only what it was.
"Then we do it here," he said. "Not in the lab. It's waited this long without leaving the tank and I'm not going to drag it through a corridor and risk it going dormant again. The chamber is already sealed. I'll need to bring the sampling array down from Lab Zero, but that's a matter of ten minutes." He paused over the console. "You're sure. This is the last time I'll ask."
"You already asked. I answered."
He pressed something, and a low chime sounded from somewhere above them, and then he was gone through the heavy door, and it closed behind him with the same hydraulic sigh, and Becca and Chloe were alone in a vault with four tanks.
Chloe let go of her arm. "You could have waited."
"I could have."
"You're treating this like a side quest."
"No." Becca turned to her, and for the first time since she had stepped up to the glass, she felt unsteady, the certainty draining out of her now that it had done its work. "I'm treating it like the thing that has been standing at the end of the hallway this entire time. Everything since the first morning has been a corridor. The scan, the fourteen, the three women, all of it. This is the door at the end." She reached for Chloe's hand and Chloe let her take it, though her fingers were stiff. "If I turn around now, we never find out what's behind it. And it's going to sit down here in the dark regardless, waiting, until somebody else walks in."
Chloe looked at the tank. The creature had drifted to the edge of its column, tracking Becca's movement with all six eyes, its whiptail coiled and uncoiling in a slow, patient rhythm.
"What if it hurts you," Chloe said. "What if it hurts the eggs. Those are our eggs, Becca. Yours and mine are the only ones left."
"They're not ours. They belong to a species that's dying." Becca said it gently, because Chloe needed it gently. "And if I'm honest, that's the answer to the question. There isn't anyone else. That's the whole thing. That's why I said yes before he finished asking."
Chloe was quiet. Then she stepped close, closer than the tanks allowed for much, and rested her forehead against Becca's shoulder, and Becca felt the small solid weight of her there, and the two hums inside them, hers and Chloe's, found the same slow note between them and held it. In the tank beside them, the red light beat steady against the glass, listening.
They stayed like that until they heard the corridor door open again, and Vance's footsteps on the black stone, and the flat clatter of equipment being wheeled ahead of him.
Then Becca straightened, and took a breath, and turned back to the tank.
The creature was waiting exactly where she had left it, tentacles spread, six eyes on the curve of her belly, patient as a thing that had already won.
The heavy door swung open and Vance came through it backwards, hauling a steel-framed lab bed on casters, its wheels groaning across the black stone. Behind him an equipment cart followed, its top tier crowded with monitoring leads and a stainless basin and the sampling array he had mentioned, a hooded instrument on a jointed arm that looked like something a dentist might use if the dentist hated you. He had not brought an orderly. He had not brought restraints. He wheeled the bed into the open space between the door and the fourth tank, set its brakes with the toe of his shoe, and straightened, breathing a little harder than the ten-minute errand should have required.
"Nobody else," he said, reading her face before she had arranged it. "I told the corridor officer we were calibrating sensors. The fewer people who know this room exists today, the fewer people who will want to stand in it tomorrow."
Becca did not answer. She had already reached for the hem of her hoodie.
Chloe made a noise behind her, the same small unhappy note as before, but Becca did not turn. The garment came up over her head in one motion, and she dropped it onto the cart without folding it, and the cool of the vault crawled over her bare arms and down her back. The hospital shorts followed, and then she was standing in the middle of the chamber with nothing between her skin and the black stone, and she was surprised by how little she cared about that, and by how much she cared about the tank.
The change in the room was immediate. Vance stopped moving. The hum of the four columns seemed to lean toward her. And the creature in the fourth tank rose in its fluid, uncoiling from the floor of its prison, every tentacle lifting at once until it hung there suspended, its six milky eyes traveling down her body and coming to rest, as they always had, on the swell of her belly. The red light behind them began to beat faster.
Chloe stepped back. She did it without being asked, one slow pace and then another, until she stood shoulder to shoulder with Vance near the console, and Becca heard her breath go shallow and fast, and wished, briefly, that she had told her something better in the last minute they'd had alone. There had not been time. There never was.
Becca looked down at herself.
Her belly was enormous now, four days past the sudden swelling, stretched tight and pale and ridged with faint blue veins that had not been there a week ago, and it was moving. Not the slow roll she had grown accustomed to, the polite turning of a creature settling in for the night. This was a restless, cramped writhing, the skin buckling and shivering in waves, shapes pressing up and sliding away, as though everything inside her had woken at once and was trying to find the door. She put both hands on it and felt the whole mass of it shudder under her palms.
"He knows," she said. Her voice sounded far away from her. "He knows that one's here."
"He," Vance repeated, from the console, writing nothing.
"Whatever. It. He." She did not care about the word. Her creature had never been a thing to her, and it was not a thing now, and there was no time to be careful. "He's been listening since we walked in. He's answering."
The writhing surged, and Becca's breath caught, because something inside her had shifted in a way it had never shifted before. It was not a kick or a roll or the little seizing twitches she had learned to ignore. It was downward. A deep, dragging pressure low in her abdomen, the sensation of a weight letting go of the shelf it had been resting on and beginning, with awful deliberateness, to slide.
"Oh," she said.
"Becca?" Chloe's voice, tight.
"Something's happening." She was already turning toward the bed. She did not think about it. Her body found the metal edge on its own, and she got herself down onto it, all fours, knees spread for balance, palms flat on the cold mattress, her back arched and her belly hanging beneath her, and the moment she was on her hands and knees the pressure crested and broke.
The contraction took her like a wave takes a swimmer who has wandered too far out. There was no mistaking it for anything else. It was the deep, whole-bodied clench of a muscle that had decided it was finished, a band of iron closing from somewhere behind her navel and squeezing all the way down, and she heard herself make a low, guttural sound that she had never made before and did not recognize. Her elbows buckled, and she caught herself on her forearms, and her hair hung down around her face, and the black stone floor blurred beneath her.
Vance moved. She caught the motion at the edge of her vision, his shoes stepping wide around the cart, and then his hands were at the bed's far edge, steadying it, and his voice cut through the roaring in her head.
"Push with it," he said. "Don't fight it. There's nothing to fight."
She did not need to be told. Her body had already made the decision, the same way it had decided to swell overnight, the same way it had decided to answer the drumming in the glass. She bore down and the pressure moved, and moved again, and the world narrowed to the single bright point of the contraction and the long hot slide of something heavy traveling through her and out.
It did not hurt the way she had braced herself for. There was a stretching, a burn, a pressure beyond bright, and then a release so complete that her whole body went slack and strange, and the creature came spilling out of her onto the mattress between her knees with a wet, soft plop that she felt in her bones.
For a moment she could not move. She stayed on her forearms with her hair in her face and her breath racking in and out, and she felt the emptiness where a passenger had been, a cavity of cool air inside her that her body had not yet remembered how to fill. It was the strangest sensation of her life. She had carried that weight for days and hated it and relied on it and now it was gone, and she found that she missed it immediately, the way you miss a tooth.
"Becca." Chloe was beside her, crouched, and there was something dark and glistening gathered in her cupped hands, something small and pulsing, its tentacles folded in and its body still wet and shuddering. Becca lifted her head far enough to see it. It was the size of a softball, and its bioluminescence was weak and flickering, like a lamp that had been unplugged and was spending the last of its charge, and Chloe held it as carefully as if it were made of eggshell.
"You caught it," Becca said.
"It fell toward the edge." Chloe's voice was wobbling but steady. "You were going to drop it on the floor."
Somewhere behind them, the vault changed. The low mechanical hum of the tanks cut out, one by one, the columns of light going dim, and in the sudden quiet the red beat from the fourth tank filled the whole room, faster and faster, so bright that Becca could see her own shadow thrown long across the black stone and the shadows of Chloe's hands and the little creature in them. She turned her head toward the glass.
The fourth donor had pressed itself flat to the front of its column, every tentacle spread wide, its whiptail lashing the fluid into foam, and the red light strobing through it was no longer a heartbeat but an alarm, a summons, the rhythm of a door being hammered at from the inside. It had seen what Chloe was holding. It wanted it. And it had been waiting for exactly this, for the thing that had been inside Becca to be outside her, in reach, in the open air where it had never been before.
Behind the glass, something like a mouth opened low along its mantle, a darker hollow ringed with faint light, and it held there, wide, waiting.
Vance was already at the glass with his notebook shut and forgotten in his hand, and for the first time since Becca had met him, he did not look tired at all.
Her belly hung low beneath her, the great stretched curve of it swaying with each ragged breath, and the eggs were all still there, nestled deep in the warm dark of her womb, undisturbed. The contractions had stopped the moment the creature left her. Her body, having accomplished what it had apparently been waiting days to accomplish, went quiet all at once, the iron band loosening, the deep pull draining out of her until she was only a woman on her hands and knees on a cold bed, empty and shaking and strangely hollow.
But the room was not quiet.
The fourth donor hammered at its glass. The red light strobing through it had quickened past anything that resembled a heartbeat, and its tentacles slapped and spread and slapped again, and the mouth low along its mantle stayed open, ringed with that faint light, a dark invitation held wide. It had seen the little wet creature in Chloe's cupped hands. It had seen Becca's belly, still heavy, still full. And it was no longer waiting patiently.
Becca pushed herself up on her arms. Her hair hung down in her face and she blew it aside, and she turned her head toward the glass, and the thing in the tank came with her, every eye tracking, every tentacle splayed.
Then she looked at Vance.
He was standing at the glass with his notebook slack in his hand, and she caught the shape of him, the tired gray man with the flat hungry eyes, and she saw that whatever he was feeling now, it was not caution.
"Release it," she said.
Chloe's head came up. "Becca."
"Release it, Julian."
Vance did not look at Chloe. He looked at Becca for one long second, reading her the way he read a scan, and then he crossed to the console, and his hand went flat against the panel, and he pressed.
The fourth tank exhaled. A seam of light ran down its length and the fluid inside it began to drain, a slow heavy gurgle that turned the floor beneath it slick, and the column dropped, the whole vessel sinking toward the stone on a hydraulic arm that lowered it like a coffin being let into the ground. The creature came down inside it, its tentacles dragged loose of the glass, its milky eyes never leaving Becca for an instant. When the tank was low enough, the front face split and folded back, and the air of the vault was suddenly full of a smell like seawater and iron, and the floor was sheets of black glass wet with what had held it.
For a moment the creature stayed where it was, spread in the ruin of its prison.
Then it moved.
It did not slither the way Becca had half expected, some boneless squid-crawl across the tile. It came forward in a single fluent heave, tentacles reaching, and it dropped over the edge of the tank and struck the floor with a wet slap that echoed up into the dark of the vault, and then it gathered itself, coiled, and drew its whole long body up onto the bed.
Becca's breath stopped in her throat. It was bigger out of the water. Its whiptail dragged up over the foot of the mattress and coiled there, looping around her left ankle almost absently, and its mass came forward between her spread knees, and its upper body reared, and the mouth along its underside was no longer waiting. It was breathing. It was making a sound, low and thrumming, that she felt in the metal of the bed and in the bones of her hips.
"Don't move," Vance said. He had come to the side of the bed, hands hovering, watching with an attention that had gone entirely clinical, and Becca would have hated him for it if she had any room left inside her to hate anyone. "It's orienting. Let it orient."
Chloe stood halfway between the console and the bed, the expelled creature still cupped in her hands, its weak blue light pulsing against her palms. She did not speak. She did not look away.
The creature's tentacles found Becca's legs. They came around her thighs first, one to each, long enough to wrap and then circle again, holding her open and pinned to the mattress with a firmness that was not cruel, only absolute, and she felt the suckers along their undersides bite and grip and settle. Then more of them, the upper arms this time, sliding up over the heavy low curve of her belly, crossing and re-crossing until the whole swell was cradled in a basket of wet grey limbs, and her breath came faster because she could feel them, unmistakably, moving with the life inside her, answering it. An arm found each of hers and wrapped soft above the elbow and held her arms where they were, palms down on the mattress, and she could no longer have gotten up if she had wanted to. She did not want to.
Its body drew itself up behind her, hard and close, and settled against the back of her, and the weight of it there was more than she had imagined, a long cool pressure along her spine and her rear.
Then she felt it.
Something at the base of its body, thick and smooth, began to press against her, low and centered, and she understood in one clear unbargained-for instant exactly what the fourth donor had been built for, and exactly what the twelve women before her had turned away from, and that understanding did not frighten her the way it should have. It felt like the last piece of a sentence she had been reading for a week.
"Becca," Chloe said quietly.
"I know."
The pressure gathered and then it was inside her, slow and steady, pushing past the first resistance with a deliberate gentleness that surprised her, and she heard her own breath break over it, a long unsteady exhalation. It did not stop. It went deeper, unhurried, and every inch of it seated her more firmly into the creature's grip, and each of the tentacles along her belly tightened by a fraction, as if the whole of it were threading itself through her and pulling true. There was no pain, or what pain there was arrived dissolved in something larger, a fullness past anything her body had vocabulary for.
It reached her womb and she felt the eggs answer it. All fourteen of them, stirred and shifting, pressed in some silent tidal recognition toward the thing that had entered, and a sound came out of Becca that was half gasp and half laugh and belonged to neither.
Then it was fully seated. The creature settled against her rear, heavy and warm, its tentacles loosened their grip by degrees but did not let go, and its red light slowed from the alarm beat into a deep, even pulse, content and enormous, beating against the inside of her and through the black stone and up into the dark vault where no one had stood comfortably in years.
Behind her somewhere, Vance lowered his hand from the console and stood very still. Beside the bed, Chloe held the little expelled creature in her cupped hands and looked at the two of them, joined, moving with the same slow rhythm, and said nothing at all.
Becca stayed on her hands and knees with her hair hanging and her full low belly hanging beneath her and the fourth donor wrapped around her spine, and for the first time since she had walked through the heavy door into this room, she did not have a single question left in her.
The first pulse came slow, deep, and wrong, a swell of pressure that started somewhere behind her navel and radiated outward through the whole of her abdomen like a second heartbeat that had nothing to do with her own. Becca's hands stayed flat on the mattress. She did not dare move. The creature behind her was a long warm weight along her spine, and the pulse came again, and again, and each one left something behind, a warmth spreading low in her, a slow liquid heat that seeped outward from the place the creature had seated itself.
She felt her belly changing. It was happening beneath her, the heavy swell she had been carrying for days filling the way a basin fills under a tapped spout, quiet and unstoppable, and she could not see it, she was on her hands and knees with her hair hanging, but she could feel it, the skin stretching, the weight increasing, the low center of gravity of her pulling another inch toward the mattress with every throb.
"What is it doing," she said. Her voice barely carried. "Julian. What is it doing to me."
The scanner was not on yet. He had found the cart, she could hear him at it, the clatter of metal, the click of switches, and he did not answer her quickly, and his silence was its own answer. The warmth kept spreading. It was not painful. That was the thing she could not get past. It should have hurt, the way her body was swelling with something that was not hers, but it did not hurt. It felt like being filled with bath water. It felt like warmth she had not asked for.
Then the smaller one moved.
Chloe made a small noise, the sound of something shifting in her cupped hands, and Becca turned her head against the wet mattress and saw the little creature lift itself. Its weak blue light stuttered against Chloe's palms and it reached, one tentacle at a time, in the direction of the bed. Toward Becca. It had been quiet when it fell out of her, shocked and dim, and now it was awake, and it was straining toward her with every fold of its small body, dragging itself over Chloe's fingers.
"It wants you," Chloe said. "Becca, it's trying to get to you."
"Don't let it."
"Your arm." Chloe was already moving, already stepping wide around a slick of tank fluid on the black stone, both hands cupped and careful. "It just wants to touch you. I think it's scared."
Becca could not move her arms. The creature had hold of her above the elbows and it had not let go, and the fluid was still rising in her, and turning her head was the only motion left to her. "Chloe, it just came out of me. It should not be trying to crawl back."
"I know." Chloe reached the edge of the bed, and she set the little one down on the mattress, just beside Becca's left forearm, careful and slow, the way you set down an injured bird. The creature did not try to enter her. It simply nestled itself against the outside of her arm, curling close, its dim light pulsing slow against her skin, and it turned its eyes up and looked at her. It looked the way a dog looks at its owner through a car window. It had no idea what was happening. It only knew she was close.
Becca lay very still. She did not want to move. Not because of the little one. Because the wrongness in her belly had begun to clarify itself, and the clarity was worse than the mystery. This was not her creature. That was the whole of it, the thing her body had been telling her since the moment the donor had pressed inside her. The one she had carried for days had been a low warm tide, a companion, a thing that lent her its own quiet and took hers in return. This one was a machine doing a job. It pulsed to a rhythm that had nothing to do with her heartbeat and everything to do with the thing it had come here to do. She could feel what it was making inside her, an ounce here, an ounce there, a slow rising flood of fluid that was not her own and would not do what her own water was supposed to do, and the eggs at the bottom of it moved the way things move in a current that is going where it likes.
Her belly had grown a full inch since the creature seated itself. She would have called the size of it nine months on any other woman. On her it looked like something out of a game, a body no longer obeying the rules that applied to bodies, and she was carrying it all suspended from her hands and knees over a cold steel bed in a basement that did not exist.
"Julian." This time she said the name flat and loud. "Talk to me. What am I looking at."
The cart light came on. A hard white wedge cut across the mattress and laid itself up her flank and across the huge low curve of her belly, and she shut her eyes against it. She heard the scanner come alive, a low whine spun up to pitch, and then the flap of it turning in his hand as he brought it around.
"Be quiet and hold still," Vance said. "Whatever it's doing, it's doing. I want a clear read before it stops."
"Before it stops."
"It pulses on a cycle. Look." She opened her eyes and turned her head, and he was standing over her with the scanner in one hand, its business end a dark bulb on a short neck, and his other hand held a small slate turned toward her. On it was a spidery graph, and the graph was a set of evenly spaced spikes, almost a chain, each one the same height. "Fourteen eggs, and the pulse rides over them, one sweep every forty seconds or so. That's a feeding cycle, Becca. Or a coating schedule. I don't know which. It came in with a plan and it's still executing it."
The scanner passed low over her belly, and every hair on her body stood up, and the creature behind her pulsed in answer to the whine of it, once, twice, faster than its cycle, as if it could hear what the machine was doing and did not care. The fluid moved inside her with the pulse and she felt it slosh, a deep roll of it that pressed her skin taut from within.
"Does it ever stop," Chloe said. She had both hands flat on the bed beside Becca's shoulder now, knuckles white, not touching her, not able to. "The filling. Is there a limit."
"Everything has a limit." Vance stepped around the bed, scanning as he went, and the wedge of light swung with him and lay across the mattress and up the black wall. His voice had the same flat professional register it always had, and it steadied her more than any kindness would have, and he did not look at her face once. "There's a volume behind it. A clutch this size needs a media, and if my read is right it's making the media now, and when it's done it'll sit and the eggs will do whatever they're going to do in it. You're a jar, Becca. A very expensive jar. That's the whole story."
"I hate you sometimes," she said.
"I know." He turned the scanner over her again, and on the slate the chain of spikes stretched longer, and he narrowed his eyes at it and made a small mark on the screen with his thumb. "The substrate is protein-rich. Some kind of nutrient matrix. It is feeding them, then. Or preparing to. Which means this isn't a dead end, it's a different pipeline." He looked up at last, and his tired eyes went from the slate to her belly to the creature coiled along her spine, and something in his face was almost gentle for one second, and then it was gone. "Congratulations. You've just become the most interesting object in this facility."
The little creature against her arm pulsed its weak blue light, once, twice, keeping time with a rhythm it could not possibly have heard, and Becca looked down at it and did not have an answer for it and did not have an answer for herself. She stayed exactly where she was, on her hands and knees, full of something new, and let the scanner whine over her and the red light beat behind the glass and the fourth donor hold her the way a tool holds a task.
The little one kept pulse, pulse, pulsing against the outside of her forearm, and Becca let herself look at it, really look at it, instead of past it at the tank, because there was nothing to do but lie still and be scanned.
It was ugly in the way newborn things are ugly, all wet folds and squash, its body still slick with what had bathed it inside her. Its light was the weak blue of a dying phone battery, but it was steady, and its eyes, small and pale and clustered along the top of its mantle, were fixed on her face. Not on her belly. Not on the eggs. On her face, which was strange, because her creature had never once seemed interested in her face.
Then it moved.
A single tentacle lifted off its crown, thinner than the others, shorter, and it came up from the mattress in a slow uncurling arc, reaching the way a vine finds a trellis. Becca watched it come and did not pull back, though every rational piece of her said she should. The tip touched her cheek.
It was warm. Not cool like the tank had been, not cool like the memory of the first insertion. Warm, and dry, and it settled there against the hollow of her cheekbone with a pressure so light she could have mistaken it for her own hair moving. It was the exact weight of another person's hand laid on her face in the dark. She did not know what to do with that. She was covered in fluid and pinned to a bed by a creature the size of a person and something small and blind was touching her face as though checking that she was still alive.
"Hey," she whispered. It was the only thing she could think to say.
The tentacle did not withdraw. It traced once down the line of her jaw and then rested, and Becca found, to her own bewilderment, that her eyes had gone hot. She was not crying. She was close. Something about the smallness of it, the futility of it, the way it had been born into a vault and would probably die in a vault and had spent its first minutes of life crawling across Chloe's fingers to get back to the person who had carried it. She had spent her whole adult life being told her body was the wrong shape and a waste of a degree and not worth the room it took up, and here was a thing the size of a grapefruit that had nearly killed itself getting to her just to touch her face.
"Okay," she said thickly. "Okay. I feel you."
The big one shifted behind her.
The weight along her spine rolled, a slow adjustment, and Becca felt the whole long length of it resettle as it drew her a half inch closer, its tentacles tightening across her belly in a single coordinated pull. Her belly had grown again. It was the sort of thing she could no longer keep track of, the way a balloon can't keep track of itself, but she could feel where the mattress was now and where she was, and the distance between was not the distance there had been. The underside of her seemed to be resting on the bed. Not hanging above it. Resting on it, spread out and heavy in its own weight, the skin pressing flat where it met the steel, and every breath she took pushed the whole mass forward against the mattress and she felt the pressure of it echo somewhere deep inside, an inward squeeze of her own stretched tissue around something that was still expanding.
"Julian," she said. "It's gotten big. My belly. It's on the bed."
"I know." He did not look up from the slate. The scanner passed low over her flank, twice, three times, the same slow sweep, and he was frowning at the readings now, not merely reading them. He reached down and adjusted something on the side of the machine and the whine climbed a note higher.
"What does that mean, you know."
"It means the volume scan's still climbing. You're up about four hundred milliliters since I started." He said it the way he would have reported a humidity reading, and then, after a beat, "That's not nothing, but it's not the concerning part."
"Then what's the concerning part."
He didn't answer. He moved around the foot of the bed, and she heard him crouch, and she could feel him looking at the place the two of them were joined, close and clinical, and she did not have any embarrassment left to spend on it.
The red light from the creature behind her changed.
It had been beating fast and bright since the tank drained, an alarm turned into a steady working rhythm while it filled her. Now it slowed. Not to the soft contented pulse of a moment ago, something deeper than that, red turning deep, almost maroon, the color of a cut fruit in the dark. It beat once and held there and beat again long after, slower than her own heart, slower than any living thing she had ever touched.
"Chloe," she said.
"I see it." Chloe had come back to the bed at some point, close enough that Becca could see her sneakers in the corner of her vision, and she had both hands curled around the mattress edge, and her knuckles were the same color as the mattress.
The deep red beat again. And this time Becca felt it inside.
Not the pulse she had grown used to. Felt, like a second pressure, moving against the first, moving down along the shaft of the thing that was still buried in her, a slow swell of mass traveling down through the length of it like a marble rolling down a garden hose, deliberate and inevitable. Her breath caught.
"Something's coming," she said.
"What."
"There's something moving. Through it. Down through it. Toward me." She could feel it distinctly now. A thick bunching pressure sliding along the inside of the appendage, a lump of something widening its way down, and her body did not have a guess about it. "Julian. Something is coming down the tube."
He was up from his crouch in a single fold, the scanner abandoned on the bed, and he came around to her other side and put his hand flat on the slate and did not explain what he was reading because he had stopped reading it. His eyes were on her belly.
The pressure reached the end of the line and released.
There was no pain. That was somehow worse than if there had been. Becca felt the mass pass out of the appendage and into her in one complete internal note, a sensation of deep impossible arrival that her body reported to her brain and then declined to elaborate on, and then the appendage withdrew slowly from her, unhurried, and the tentacles loosened their grip across her belly one by one and slipped away, and the creature behind her lifted off her spine and settled back onto the mattress in a collapse of limbs, spent, its deep red light going dim and dimmer and slow and then steady at a low idle.
Becca stayed on her hands and knees and felt only her own weight.
Then something moved inside her that was not the eggs.
It was low and it was lateral, an unhurried drift from one side of her belly to the other, closer to the surface than the eggs had ever been, and it did not feel like anything that belonged to her. It felt alive. It felt like the first kick but turned around, an arrival instead of an answer, and after a moment it moved again and this time there was a definite shape to the motion, a long small body pressing against the inside wall of her and testing it, a thing in a tank learning the walls of its tank.
She looked down.
There was no way to see through her own skin, but she could see the shape of what was under it, a slow swell breaking against the underside of her navel and trailing away, like a fish that had just turned a corner. The mass of her belly had an internal geography now that it had not had a minute before. Her eggs sat in their warm dark and something new swam a lazy loop above them.
She heard Vance take a breath and hold it.
She heard Chloe take two quick steps back from the bed, then a third, and from the corner of her eye she saw her standing with her hand pressed hard over her mouth and her eyes enormous above it, and she was very pale, and she was not looking away, she was looking straight at Becca's belly like she was watching the same thing Becca was feeling.
Becca looked back down at the shape moving under her skin. She watched it complete another slow lap and settle, and she felt it settle, the way you feel a stranger's hand close around your wrist.
Almost against her will, with the little warm tentacle still resting on her cheek, she said it out loud.
"That can't be good."
Vance did not answer her.
He had the scanner up already, its dark bulb sweeping the low curve of her, and the whine of it climbed and held. In his other hand the slate was tilted toward his face, and the light off it made his tired eyes look younger and stranger than they were.
"Julian."
"Hold still."
She held still. The little tentacle stayed where it was on her cheek, warm and dry, the exact weight of a palm in the dark. Below the bed the spilled tank fluid lay across the black stone in long silver sheets. The vault smelled of seawater and iron.
Chloe came back to the mattress edge. She had both hands wrapped around the steel frame and she was the color of skimmed milk. "What does it show?" she said. "Julian. What does it show."
He didn't answer that either. The scanner passed low over Becca's flank, and over the underside of her, and came back. Then he reached down and turned a dial, and the whine climbed a note higher, and he went very still.
It took Becca a while to move at all.
Her arms had gone numb from holding her own weight. She worked the feeling back into them, and then she pushed herself up off her hands and knees, and the big creature behind her let her go. Its tentacles slipped off her thighs one at a time, wet and heavy, and settled onto the mattress in a slow coil that did not follow her. Her belly came up with her, huge, and she sat back on her heels with her hands underneath it and her breath short from the effort of a movement that had once been nothing.
The small one came along. At some point while she was shifting it had climbed her arm. It hung from her left forearm now, tentacles wrapped twice around her wrist and up toward her elbow, and its weak blue light beat against the inside of her arm like something under a thin blanket.
The thing inside her belly moved again.
It was quick. That was the word for it. It had none of the patient wallowing her eggs had taught her, none of the slow turning of a body that trusted the dark. It went corner to corner, fast enough that she felt the skin of her flank ripple with it, fast enough that her own organs shifted out of its way. It was hunting. She didn't know how she knew that, only that she did, the way she had known the drumming in the tank had been meant for her.
"Vance," she said. "What are you looking at."
"There were fourteen," he said.
"I know there were fourteen."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.