Maura knocks lightly before entering the little room. Jane's back is to her, and Maura knows she's bent over the maps of the neighborhood, the laminated one from the corner store, and the one she's drawn from memory.
"It's dinner," Maura says quietly.
Jane only glances up. "Save me what's left."
"There won't be anything left. You know that."
"Then I'll eat tomorrow," Jane says gruffly. "After my run."
Maura frowns. "You're going out again." Not quite a question.
Jane sighs heavily. "I've gotta. There's others down in Southie, I know it."
"That's four days in a row."
Jane makes an irritated movement. "I'm fine."
"You're tired. You're not eating properly."
"I'll add a supply run at the end."
"You know that's not what I meant."
Jane turns from the table. It is the first time Maura has seen her since the morning, and the cut below Jane's eye and the bruise on her chin make Maura gasp.
"What happened?" she asks urgently, stepping forward to take Jane's face in hers.
"Nothing," Jane says, though she knows better than to turn away. "Met some Grins on the way. They tried to take one of the kids."
"Jane-"
"I wasn't gonna let a kid get taken, Maura!" She flinches as Maura presses the bruise.
"I wasn't suggesting you let that happen, sweetheart," Maura says softly. "I was suggesting you eat some food so that you can continue to protect what you love."
Jane growls, but she lets Maura wrap her arms around her waist.
"I don't love them," she says into the shorter woman's hair. "I'm just doing what needs to be done."
…
She doesn't love them.
Of course.
She brings two more littles home on her next run, and when the youngest boy refuses to let her go, she swings him up onto her back and does her evening routine like that.
She doesn't love them, but she tucks then in one by one each night, pretends not to notice when they sneak, one by one again, onto the queen size mattress she and Maura share in the next room. She feeds them her scraps, and more often than not, her full portions.
But no.
She doesn't love them at all.
…
They are twenty, and then they are seventeen, and then they are almost thirty without any sign of shrinking.
She and Jane fight one night about the parents of these lost children. About the adults who are not Grins, the ones who are not trying to kill their own children.
About where they might be.
"We lost a 1:1 ratio almost ten kids ago," Maura says. "I care about what happens to them as much as you do, Jane, but we cannot sustain this many children."
"I'm supposed to not look at them when they come out during one of my supply runs? I'm supposed to pretend I don't see them?"
"That's not what I'm saying. I...We don't have the room."
"We'll make more room. Or we'll all go somewhere else."
"This is the safest place we've been since the morgue was infected and overrun."
"I'm not just going to leave a kid behind. I can't just turn my feelings off like you can, doctor."
Maura breathes deeply into the silence that follows this remark. She imagines that she can smell Jane's regret and her anger and her fear.
"I'm sorry." Soft, but sincere enough to wipe away most of the hurt.
Jane is the only one who came back from the edge of insanity. Only she knows why men and women began to turn on their children and their neighbors and their friends.
Only she has felt the wild, ecstasy filled smile that cannot be erased from the faces of the murderers.
Not even when there is the blood of their closest loved ones on their lips.
Not even when it drips from their teeth.
"Saving fifty children," Maura says lowly, "saving five hundred children won't bring him back."
She doesn't want to wound in kind. This statement is not payback. It is simply a plea.
"He's dead," she continues, when there is no answer. "And these now...they need you."
Jane presses her hands together. She links and unlinks her fingers.
"Sometimes I can feel his little chest in my hands," she says thickly. "Sometimes I feel the way my mouth stretched...The big, soaring happy."
Maura puts her hands on Jane's shoulders. "You are not a Grin," she says.
"Not any more," Jane says.
"That's right," Maura agrees.
This doesn't seem to make Jane feel better. "Does that make it better or worse...what I did?"
…
The ones she figures over twelve, the girls and the boys. she keeps them up after dark one night.
She leads them into the room designated for weaponry. In another six months, most of their ammunition will be old and stale, useless…
She sits, and they sit around her silent and waiting and all wide, reverent eyes.
"Do you remember your names?" she asks the room at large. "Tomorrow we're going out. On a supply run. I am not protecting you by keeping you in. Maura will keep teaching you, but every other week we'll go out.
"I'll teach you too."
They want to speak. Maura can see from her vantage point that they are dying to speak, even though they are afraid of her.
"So remember your names or choose new ones," Jane says in her rough voice. "When you're ready, Say it. You only have to say it once. I'll remember."
…
They name themselves:
near, leek, hide, able, tao, maw
There are twins named bark & bite. Rough and dark as dirt.
There is a little girl named growl.
A boy says he is wool.
They offer Jane their names and true to her word, she only needs to be told once.
Maura can hear them whispering as they drift off to sleep, telling the younger ones hte tale of staying up late with Jane, and remembering their names.
A privilege.
They go out the next morning, filing past Jane's steely and unsmiling glare, standing a little taller when she doesn't stop them.
When she deems them all capable.
"Grins are people," she says, blinking around at them all. "They know what they are doing and they don't want to be doing it. But don't think for a second that their desire to stop will win out over the need to rip you open."
She pauses, and for a moment, Maura sees her as she was when this began. Sees her bent over the crib.
Sees the wild, insane elation on her face.
"The better they know you, the more they will want you. So if you see a Grin that you know...run like hell."
"Where?" one of the twins pipes up. Bark, Maura thinks, though she can't really tell. "Where do we run?"
Jane tilts her head to look at him. It takes her a moment to answer.
"Run here," she says finally. "Run home."
But no.
She doesn't love any of them at all.