Chapter 14 The Lunas Desk
The brass handle is cold enough to sting, and I stand there holding it longer than I need to.
Then I push. The study is empty. The chair behind the desk is turned out at an angle, the way a person leaves a chair when they stand up fast, and there's no coat on the back of it.
"Luna."
The Beta is by the window. Six months ago his shoulders split doorframes and his eyes ran red at the edges.
Now he wears a pressed shirt buttoned to the collar, and only his nails give him away, thick and yellow and filed flat. He holds out a folder with both hands and drops his gaze to my shoes.
"These are the files you asked for."
I take it. The paper is warm from his hands.
Patrol rotations. A ration count from the east barns. A casualty list. Under all of it, a cream envelope with an embossed seal I know from another life, back when seals like that meant permits and parking tickets.
An invitation to talk. From what's left of the human coalition.
It matters to the humans. It matters to the pack. But it matters most to me.
I have always known that running was never a real solution. Leo can't come with me into what's left of human society. Not like this, not what he is now. I knew that. I didn't have anything better.
Now I do.
I look at the chair. Then I sit down in it. The seat is cold, which means he's been gone for a while.
"Bring me the barn count from last week too," I say. "I want to compare."
The Beta's head comes up. Whatever is in his face, he takes it out of the room with him.
The stack grows.
By the end of the first week it's two folders. By the third it's a crate, and Nia carries it in on her hip and dumps it on the desk hard enough to rattle the lamp.
I learn that we have seven hundred and eleven mouths, that forty of them are under the age of six, that the north patrol has been trading fuel for cigarettes and thinks nobody notices.
I settle a fight over a generator between a wolf who has been here since the first winter and a wolf who walked in with the eastern surrenders. I make them split the hours. Both of them hate it, which Nia tells me is the correct outcome.
I stop dreaming. There's no room left in my head for it. At night I fall into the mattress with ink on my fingers and Luca's weight against my ribs, and my last thought is usually about Luca's breathing.
The negotiations happen on a Wednesday, in a building that used to be a municipal courthouse.
I wore my least-damaged clothes. I prepared for three days. I had five pages of notes.
The human delegates were frightened, I could see it in the way they positioned themselves beside the exits, but the fear had curdled into a kind of contempt, the kind that comes from deciding the thing you're afraid of is beneath you.
They talked about the pack the way you'd talk about a containment problem. Reserved territory. Enforced borders. Permanent residence restrictions. And then, as though it were a minor logistical note at the end of a meeting, the last clause:
Reproductive cessation. Mandatory. Effective immediately.
I remember the silence in the room.
I remember the way the Alpha, the one who wears Leo's face and never smiles, set the document flat on the table. Didn't throw it. Didn't raise his voice. Just placed it down with a kind of finality, looked at the lead delegate for exactly two seconds, and stood up.
The talks ended there.
On the way back, he said it, not quite to me and not quite to himself:
"One pack is a small number."
He was right. We knew it.
He's gone eleven days later, and then he's gone most of the time.
The reports come to me instead of him. The southern packs fold in the first month. The river packs cost him twenty-six wolves and a broken arm he didn't tell me about. I found out anyway.
Names I've never heard of come across my desk and turn into names on my ration lists, and the ration lists get longer, and I start counting in thousands.
Nia comes in one afternoon and puts a phone on my desk.
I stare at it. Charged. A signal bar. Out there, someone has a tower running again.
"You're not worried?" I ask. "About what I might say. To whoever."
She grins with all her teeth, which is a lot of teeth. "King says. Is watched."
Of course it is.
He calls at night. Every night, without fail, and the voice on the other end is the one that says my name like it's a joke we're both in on, and asks what Luca ate, and tells me to eat something myself.
Some nights it's four minutes. Some nights I fall asleep with the phone against my ear.
The daytime calls are rarer. Those are about grain stores and border patrols and which of the new wolves I need to keep a closer eye on. They last as long as they need to and not one word longer.
And then there are the other ones.
One day ago the phone buzzed while I was signing off on a fuel manifest.
"Does he need toys," he said. No greeting. "For learning. The stacking kind."
"He's six months old."
"Answer the question, Rosalind."
The line was dead before I finished saying yes.
On the carpet, Luca goes past my foot at speed.
He shouldn't be able to do that. Six months, and he crosses the whole rug on his hands and knees without wobbling, turns at the fireplace, comes back.
He's growing too fast. I don't let the thought get any further than that.
The door opens and the cold comes in first.
I smell frost and pine tar and iron before I look up, and the King is standing in the doorway in a coat that's still white at the shoulders, snow melting in his hair.
Luca's head snaps around.
He shrieks, one high delighted note, and he's moving before I'm out of my chair, scrambling across the carpet with his knees thumping, and he grabs the King's leg with both arms and holds on.
Then he tips his head all the way back. That small face, Leo's chin, Leo's eyes.
"Papa!"
I'm across the room without deciding to be. I scoop him up under the arms and he kicks, furious, reaching past me.
"Luca, no." My voice comes out wrong, too quick, too bright. "That's not Papa, sweetheart."
And then I hear myself.
Luca is six months old.
It's the same body. The same hands, the same throat. I have been drawing a line down the middle of one man for months and teaching my son to stand on my side of it. My face goes hot and I keep my eyes on the top of Luca's head.
Above me, low, unhurried:
"He's right."
I look up.
Green eyes, steady on mine, close enough that I can feel the cold still coming off his coat.
"I'm his father," he says.