9 Kaia
Something carried me through the dark, and the dark had a rhythm.
Up, and a jolt, and down. Up, and a jolt, and down.
Each drop punched a small wet sound out of my chest that I didn’t recognize as mine until it happened a fourth time, and a fifth, and then the rhythm had a name—footsteps, fast ones, a body moving at speed over uneven stone—and the thing the footsteps belonged to was holding me against it, and I was the wet sound.
I came up out of nothing into a world made entirely of water.
The water dragged first. Somewhere below us it ran in a thin sheet over rock, and I could hear every separate place it caught and broke, a hundred small failures of water against stone, each one distinct, each one arriving in my skull like a struck bell.
Above that, breath. Not mine.
Dozens of breaths, layered, ragged, a stampede of lungs somewhere ahead in the black, and under all of it a thread of voices kept low and terrified, and I could pick a single one out of the mass if I wanted to—a woman, near the front, praying in a language I’d processed on intake forms but never learned.
Containment of a destabilizing patient requires—
The catechism reached for me and got nothing. The shelf it usually pulled from was bare.
Far above, muffled through what had to be tons of rock, a siren wound up and up and did not stop. A Verdant Order siren. The compound’s alert array, the one that only sang when the wards read a breach.
My hands.
My hands were wrong.
I brought them up out of the gray cloth pressed against them—they obeyed, slow and far away, like instruments handled through a wall.
I pressed them flat against the chest carrying me, and they came away sticky.
Tacky. The substance had gone half-dry between my fingers, webbing the spaces, gluing two of them together at the second knuckle, and when I worked them apart it pulled with a small obscene sound and the smell came up off them and into me.
Copper and salt and something underneath that, hot and private, the inside of a body turned out.
Blood.
It smelled like the back of my own throat after the recalibrations, when I’d bitten through my cheek to keep from screaming and Mother had said—
I gagged.
The chest under my cheek stopped.
“Hey. Hey, no. Stay with me.”
Tommy.
The voice arrived through bone as much as air, a low vibration where my ear pressed his sternum, and the wolf inside me—
The thing inside me came up off the floor of me and leaned toward the sound.
That was the part that broke something. Not the blood.
Not the dark. The fact that the chained thing under my ribs, the static, the flaw, the noise I had spent twenty-six years holding underwater with both hands over its mouth, lifted its head at the sound of his voice and went loose and easy and glad, the way nothing in me had ever once been glad, and his scent flooded down over me from above and the thing in me opened its mouth and drank.
Crushed green. Warm stone with the whole day’s sun still in it.
Woodsmoke gone soft and far. It poured into my lungs and spread out behind my ribs and the boiling thing in my blood—because my blood was boiling, I noticed it all at once, a low fever pressure building behind my sternum and between my legs and at my jaw—the boiling thing reached toward his scent like a hand toward a fire on a winter night, and I despised it, and I could not stop it, and somewhere in the despising my eyes found focus.
Stone above me. A low arched ceiling slick with mineral runoff, picked out faintly by light that wasn’t light, a gray that lived at the very bottom of seeing.
Limestone. The drainage spillway. I knew its name from a maintenance schedule I’d countersigned and never once thought about, a line item, a flow capacity, a thing that existed only on paper until the night I woke up being carried through it in someone’s arms with another man’s blood drying on my hands.
Whose blood?
The memory came all at once. My fingers stretching.
The skin of them splitting and not hurting, which was worse than hurting, the wrongness of bone going long inside my hand while the nail blackened and curved and thickened into something that was not a nail.
The gray linen of my tunic tearing at the shoulder seam as the thing underneath surged.
And Miller’s face—a Warden, who carried the blood-lock for the lower floors, like all Wardens did, Miller, who smelled of peppermint and the sour thing under it—turning toward me a half-second before my arm came across his throat almost gently, almost graceful, and the heat that sprayed out of him went black across the steel and hot across my own knuckles and I had liked it.
That was the thing.
When I opened Warden Miller from one side of his neck to the other—I had liked it because he’d bee—
I killed him. I tore his throat out with my hand. I have killed a man.
Good. He deserved his death. He hurt our mate.
My breath went—a fist closing on my windpipe from the inside, and my chest heaved against Tommy’s and pulled nothing, heaved again, a high thin whistle scraping in past the lump where air used to live, and the fever surged with the panic and doubled it, and the tunnel tilted, and I was the woman on the welcome mat now, I was the slack-jawed thing on the intake floor that I had knelt beside and cleaned and apologized to, I had become it, I was the monster they had warned me about my whole life and I had done it in front of—
Tommy stopped walking.
He turned, all the way around, putting his back to the direction the footsteps and the praying ran, and he gathered me up off the crook of his arm and against the whole front of him so that there was no air between us anywhere, and he dropped his face down into the top of my hair and held it there.
“Breathe.” The word went straight through my skull and into the spine. “You’re breathing. You’re doing it right now, feel it, in—” His chest expanded against mine, a slow deliberate swell, demonstrating. “—and out. There. Match me. Just that. Nothing else exists but that.”
I tried the old anchor instead, grasping for the words my mother had bruised into my spine.
The wild rose must be trimmed.
I forced the mantra through my mind, waiting for the cold gray comfort of control.
But the doctrine had a hole in it now exactly the shape of the thing I’d done.
My inner wolf rose up, bloody-jawed and massive in the dark, and snarled at the words, rejecting the pruning entirely.
It bared its teeth at the cage I’d built for it. My mind fell through the hole.
So I did the other thing. The only other thing left in the kit.
I forced my hands flat.
They were shaking—both of them, badly, the blood gone gummy and brown in the creases—and I dragged them up off his chest and pressed them together, palm to palm, fingers laced and folded the way Mother had set them when I was six, holiness begins in the spine not in the heart, her nails leaving crescent moons between my shoulder blades until the muscles shook and held.
I built the rest of it the way I’d been built.
Spine straight against gravity, against the swing of his stride, against the fever.
Chin level. The Steward’s Rest, assembled out of a screaming body in the dark, because it was the only structure I had ever been given and a poor shabby thing is still a thing to stand inside of when the floor is gone.
A whine broke out of Tommy when he felt me do it. An actual whine, grief-pitched, the sound a dog makes at a closed door.
“No—Kaia, no, don’t—you don’t have to hold anything, there’s no one watching, you can just—”
I opened my mouth. I needed to give him the correct information.
He was carrying a contaminated person through an evacuation corridor and there were protocols, there were protocols, and protocols were the last clean thing I had ever owned, and so I gathered the Steward’s voice up out of the wreckage and I made it speak.
“You are in contact with a contaminated blood-magic material.” It came out thin and even and entirely wrong, a recording played at the wrong speed, a malfunction wearing my mouth.
“Sanitary Directive nine-four, subsection C. Any individual exposed to uncontained discharge from a subject must be quarantined and decontaminated within—” My voice hit a wall and climbed over it.
“—within ninety minutes of exposure. You should set me down. You should not be carrying me. I am the contamination. The directive is very clear, you have to—you have to log the exposure and you have to—”
“Kaia.”
“—you have to report it, there’s a form, it’s the amber form, I’ve filed it forty times, I filed it for the woman on the mat and they made it disappear but I filed it, I always file it, you have to—”
My voice cracked clean across the middle, and the training stopped, and what was underneath it was a small sound I had no doctrine for at all.
Tommy made a noise into my hair that I felt more than heard, and his arms came in tighter. When he spoke his voice had gone thick.
“There it is,” he murmured. “There’s the worst part of them.
You’re standing in a tunnel with your soul cracked open and you’re trying to file the paperwork on yourself.
” His mouth pressed once, hard, into my hair.
“You didn’t get contaminated, sweetheart.
You got born. There’s a difference and I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving it to you, but right now I just need you to keep breathing and let me carry you, okay?
Let me carry you. That’s the whole job. That’s all you have to do. ”
The fever rolled through me and his scent rolled through the fever and the thing in me—the thing that had liked it, the thing that had opened Miller’s throat and felt no sorrow—settled in my chest with its head down and went quiet against him, and that quiet was the most frightening thing of all, because it wasn’t shame.
I knew shame. I had been raised inside shame the way a fish is raised inside water.
This was not that. This was an animal that had done a terrible thing for a true reason and felt, underneath all my horror, at peace.
Mine, it said. Ruined and certain and unrepentant, looking out through my eyes at the man who held us.
I started to cry, finally, and unfolded my hands.
Tommy turned and started running, his arms a cage I no longer wanted out of, and I pressed my wet face into the soaked cotton over his heart and listened to it slam, and let myself count it the way I’d counted my own pulse a thousand times—two fingers, a silent catechism—except I had no fingers free and no catechism left, so I just counted his heart against my cheek, and it was beating much too fast, exactly as fast as mine.
Ahead, the stampede of breath quickened and broke into something almost like sobbing relief, and the quality of the dark changed too—the gray thinned, paled, took on a wash of true silver—and a thread of air came down the tunnel toward us that was not the dead mineral breath of the spillway.
Cold. Wild. Pine sap and wet leaf-rot and the green animal dark of an actual forest, and under it, growing, a wall of scent unlike anything the compound had ever held inside its lavender-sheeted walls.
Musk. Fur. The dense layered presence of bodies, many of them, men, all of them, a pressure that arrived in my chest before my eyes had anything to show me, and the thing under my ribs surged up and pressed itself flat against the inside of my skin, hackles I did not know I had standing up along my spine.
The tunnel mouth opened onto a slice of cold star-shot night, and they were waiting in it.
Wolves, it said. Wolves. Many. Not-mine. Not-mine. Not-mine.