13 Kaia
Before Tommy could answer the fear in my question, an evacuation horn sounded.
It came in three short blares, and underneath each one a second tone rode along like a shadow at a frequency that made my teeth hum and the chained thing under my ribs come up off the floor of me snarling.
Tommy was off the cot before the third blare finished.
I felt it as a tearing. His skin came away from mine—his chest, his arm, the long bar of his body—and the place where he’d been pressed against me went instantly cold. Then the opposite hit, because the second the contact broke, my own heat came roaring back to take the space he’d left.
“Stay down,” he said.
His hand was already finding boots, his voice flat in a way I hadn’t heard from him, the joke scraped out of it. “Kaia. Look at me. I need to check on what’s happening. You stay right here. Don’t move. I’m coming back—”
“Tommy.” Reed’s voice came from outside, and it did not sound like a man asking.
It came in under the canvas and landed somewhere behind my sternum, and even I, who belonged to no pack, who had been built specifically to belong to nothing, felt my spine straighten to it. “Line. Now. We’ve got green flames on the east ridge.”
Green flames? My breath caught. Had one of the Saints found us?
I should have felt relief that rescue was on its way. I did not feel relief. Images of those women, my former patients, coming out of those cells rose in my mind. I didn’t know how to reconcile what I’d seen with what my religion had taught me was true.
Whatever passed over Tommy’s face then, I caught the edge of it. He looked at me like a man setting down something he wasn’t sure would be there when he came back for it.
“Kaia, please stay. You’re not our prisoner. I swear it. I’ll explain everything once I know it’s safe.”
Then he was through the flap and gone, the canvas swinging shut behind him.
The fever bloomed out from my spine, pushing against the underside of my skin until I felt too small for my own body.
I considered getting up and leaving to test the truth in his words.
But the heat was a living weight swelling behind my ribs.
But it wasn’t just heat. It was a knock.
A soft, rhythmic tap against the back of my breastbone, like someone trapped in a cellar trying to find a hollow seam in the stone.
Symptom, my trained mind whispered, reaching for the faith that had guided my way until now. Pathological pressure on the central nervous system. Suppress and isolate.
The voice that answered didn’t come from my ears. It rose from the cold mud of my oldest memories, maybe even before that, faint and dusty as a ghost in an attic. Stone is cold. Deep in the dark. Open, sister. We are one river.
I clutched my knees, my fingernails biting into my skin. The refrain started, a defensive shield: Symptom. Only a symptom.
Scent arrived next, a wall of it. I had not understood that I’d been smelling the world at half-strength while Tommy’s body wicked it off me.
Now it all came in at once: wet ash, crushed pine needles from the ridge, the iron-and-salt of fifty frightened women bedded down in tents across the staging ground.
And under the woodsmoke, a thread of rotten, chemical green.
Out past the canvas, women were crying. I could pick them out one at a time. I could count them.
They were free from what had been done to them in that basement, but for how long?
I sat up on the cot, wrapped my shredded Steward’s tunic around me, and folded my hands in my lap, right over left, thumbs crossed—the position my mother had set my fingers into before I had language. What had she known?
I had spent years believing in the Verdant Order’s catechism. We were a long line of Stewards, from mother to daughter to mother to daughter, tasked with the incredible responsibility of helping others out of the dark.
I had trained myself to look past the terror in their eyes and see only the necessary work of the Order. The Order was the shield. The Order kept the wildness from destroying us.
But now, the wildness was inside my own skin, and it wasn’t a disease. It was a fire, yes, but it was a fire that felt like clean, rushing wind. It was the only part of me that had ever felt awake. And if the wolf wasn’t the sickness, then what had I been doing all these years?
My stomach twisted into knots at the thought. The patient names slid off my mental ledger like melting wax. I had stood by while they cuffed women who looked just like me. I had held the stylus while the processors took them down to the lower floors. I had called it care.
The horror of it pressed down on my lungs until I couldn’t draw a breath.
The canvas flap groaned, admitting a draft of wind that smelled of wet slate and scorched pine. Four women filed into the small tent, their shadows stretching long across the dirt floor under the lantern light.
I pressed my back against the pine support pole of the cot. The rough bark scraped through the thin linen of my shirt.
“Who are you?”
The scent in the tent shifted instantly.
The woodsmoke from the stove was swept away by a sudden, heavy wave of sweetness that made the wolf under my ribs scratch at my lungs.
It was a scent like sweet clover crushed underfoot, or warm milk left on a sunny sill.
It carried a strange, double-pulsed warmth that made my chest ache.
“It’s all right. We’re here to help.”
I drew my knees up, my boots digging into the canvas of the cot. The woman who had spoken wore silver rings on her fingers and smelled of dried rosemary and cellar dirt.
I might not have had much time with my own wolf yet, but I knew somehow that no wolf lived in her. She had only the dry, quiet hum of earth magic.
But the other three...
The wolf inside me whimpered, a low, desperate sound. The scent of pregnancy was a physical weight.
My eyes fixed on the small woman in the center.
Her shirt was pulled tight over a belly that had already rounded into a soft curve.
But the other two—the tall one with the shock of dark red hair and the one with the cropped, jagged cut—carried the same double beat.
It was faint, like a heartbeat through a thick wall, but real.
All three of them were pregnant.
The yearning started in the soles of my feet and rushed up to my throat like a thick, suffocating dust. My hands clenched around my shins. A memory, sharp and jagged, cut through the fever.
The garden behind the sector four dormitory.
She had sat on the stone bench, her fingers clumsy but warm as she braided my hair, whispering about the wild roses that grew along the fence.
They have to trim them, Kaia. If they don’t, the thorns take the path.
Her fingers had been real. Her hand had been warm.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but the scent of the three women stayed in my nose, thick and sweet and agonizing.
Under ice, the river runs, the presence inside whispered, her words tasting of crushed dandelion and wet clay. Grass under paw, mud under sole. Remember? Before the gray. Before the iron. We ran.
I clutched my shins tighter, my throat tight. Contagion, I thought, but the clinical definition felt thin against the smell of the pine. Only a memory.
“You are crossing the quarantine line,” I said, my voice dry as paper. I didn’t look at them. “Sanitary Directive nine-four. An uncalibrated subject in active failure must remain…. You are violating the perimeter.”
The cropped-haired woman let out a short, sharp laugh, the sound like dry twigs snapping. “Listen to the gray-suit. Still trying to keep her folders organized.” She leaned against the tent pole, crossing her arms.
The woman with the rounded belly reached out, her fingers catching the cropped-haired woman’s sleeve. “Stop, Genny. She’s burning up. We’ve all been there.” She took a slow step toward the cot, her eyes soft, settling on my face. “I’m Wren.”
I didn’t know the name. I only knew the way her wolf felt, quiet and maternal and solid, offering a strange peace that my own wolf wanted to crawl toward.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I muttered, pressing my heels into the canvas cot. “You’re... You’re carrying. The fever could be infectious.”
“That’s now how it works,” the red-haired woman said. She stepped up beside Wren, her posture long and relaxed, though her eyes watched me with a heavy, searching intensity. “I’m Nell. And it’s not infectious. It’s just the wolf trying to break the ice the Order put around you.”
“She doesn’t want the ice broken,” Genny said.
She didn’t move from the entrance, her jaw set in a hard, pale line.
“Look at her. She’s clinging to the manual like a life raft.
I know her face. You walked the row, Kaia.
In your clean boots. You had that silver stylus in your hand, and you didn’t look at our faces.
You just looked at the numbers on the monitors.
You checked my pulse and signed the transfer sheet. ”
My throat went dry. The memory slammed into me. The cold fluorescent lights of the ward. The rows of steel tables. The women in the paper gowns, their skin gray with exhaustion.
“The calibration...” My voice was barely a breath. “It was... we were sorting the high-risk subjects. To ensure proper medical intervention.”
“It was a harvest queue,” Genny said, her voice dropping into a flat, deadly quiet.
Her eyes went gold at the edges. “They took my voice that day. They put the silver collar on me and turned my throat to glass so I couldn’t speak to my mate, couldn’t call for help.
I spent years mute in a basement serving Thalakor—”
“You had the honor of serving one of the Inner Circle?”
Genny’s lip curled in disgust. “He was evil, Kaia. And you helped put me there. Because of your ‘proper medical intervention.’ And you’re still sitting there quoting their lies.”
“I didn’t...” I looked down at my hands. The skin of my knuckles was torn, dried blood black in the creases. “I didn’t write the directives.”