13 Kaia #2
“But you carried them out,” Genny said. “You wore the gray coat. You ate their bread. You watched us go down the elevator and you went back to your warm bed.”
“Genny, that’s enough,” Wren said.
She didn’t look back, but her voice carried a quiet authority that made the cropped-haired woman shut her mouth, though her boots kicked at a loose stone in the dirt.
Wren knelt at the edge of the cot, her hand resting on her knee. “We aren’t the Order, Kaia. We don’t judge you by a ledger. But you have to let the ledger go. If you keep fighting the wolf, the fever will kill you.”
Genny looked away as if she could see through the tent canvas. Her face back then still stood clear in my mind. I’d been helping people like her for years overcome the darkness clawing at their minds.
Or so I’d thought.
“I prayed for someone to come in and give me the injection to make the humming stop. I thought if they just took the wildness out, I’d be clean again.
” Wren’s voice softened as she touched the edge of my cot.
“But the humming wasn’t a sickness. It was my wolf-sister.
It was also my mate trying to find me. It was the only part of me that knew my true name.
When Brann found me, he didn’t give me a rulebook.
He just held my hand through the bars until I stopped shaking.
He showed me the bond isn’t a cage, Kaia. It’s the door.”
“When Santos found me,” Nell said. “I thought I had been fighting the enemy. Turns out, I’d been working for the enemy all along. The Order wants you to believe you’re a threat to yourself so you’ll hand them the keys to your own cage. But the wolf in us isn’t a parasite.”
“You still think the gray coat makes you clean,” Genny said, her voice sharp as glass.
She took a step toward the cot, her fingers tracing a scar on her neck.
“You were trying to help. You think you’re different because you didn’t put the collar on me yourself?
You must have guessed—sensed—something was wrong. ”
I looked away. The room seemed to shrink, the smell of bleach from my memories mixing with the sharp scent of Genny’s anger.
I remembered Warden Miller and dozens of others like him.
The unnecessary cruelty, the special doors locked to me, the patients who vanished, never to be seen again.
I’d been told they’d been cured and resumed normal lives.
But I had known that wasn’t the full truth. Somewhere deep down, hadn’t I known?
They speak true, the wolf inside whispered, the sensation brushing my mind like a skirt through dry grass. You built the brick walls. Yet I waited. I kept your mother’s voice when they washed it from your head. I held the memory of the garden for you. I am not a monster. I am your sister.
I shook my head, my teeth clicking. The manual says the host is consumed. It says you’re a parasite.
I am not, she whispered back, and the warmth of her breath flared behind my ribs, smelling of the clean rain we had both forgotten. Sisters before the gray. Let me run, Kaia. I keep the hearth.
“I... I thought it was safety,” I whispered. “If we didn’t control it, the wildness would destroy us. That’s what I was taught since before I could remember. I was born into this and—”
“And look where it got you,” Genny said. “You’re sitting in the dirt, burning alive, holding onto the rules of the people who want to keep you in a box. You want to die? Go ahead. Keep fighting your wolf. But if you want to live, you have to let the fire burn.”
“The Order’s teachings...” I whispered, my eyes burning. “If I let it go... I won’t be me anymore. I’ll be... a beast.”
Nell let out a soft sigh, sitting on a low wooden stool. “Do we look like beasts?”
I looked at them. Wren, with her soft mouth and the quiet strength in her shoulders.
Nell, whose eyes held a deep, weathered peace.
Even Genny, despite the gold in her eyes and the tension in her jaw, stood with a sovereign grace I had never seen in any of the Wardens.
They were more real than anyone I had ever known in all the white corridors I’d worked.
“They lied to you,” Nell said, her voice carrying the smell of pine and clean earth. “They tell you the wolf is a monster so you’ll let them cut it out of you. They want you hollowed out, Kaia. It’s easier to write numbers on an empty vessel. How can you explain Tommy?”
My heart lurched. Tommy.
Mate.
Warden Miller had hurt Tommy and something inside me snapped. I’d killed him and even now a part of me relished the fact he was dead. I would never allow anyone to hurt Tommy.
“But I don’t know how to be anything else.”
“You start by letting us help,” Wren said. She stood and walked to the corner of the tent, where a metal bucket of water sat on a wooden crate. She poured it into a shallow tin basin, the water splashing cold and bright.
Inside me, a quiet hum arose, the scent of well-water mixing with wild clover. Hands did strike, yet he deserved the blood. You saved your mate. Let the water wash the red.
My chest hitched.
Nell took the basin from Wren, picked up a clean cloth, and knelt right in the dirt by my feet.
She dipped the cloth in the water, wrung it out with a wet, twisting sound, and reached for the dried blood on my hands. “Whoever this belonged to—”
“A Warden. A cruel one.’’
Nell nodded. “I know he deserved it. They all deserve it, and more.”
The cloth was cool, the water lifting the dried rust of Miller’s blood from my skin. She worked the damp cotton over my knuckles, cleaning the dirt from under my nails.
As the tears came, the last latch on the cellar door gave way.
My wolf walked in like a sister coming home after a long journey, her hands reaching out to fold around my shaking shoulders.
The warmth that filled me wasn’t a fever anymore.
It was the solid presence of another soul matching my own, breathing when I breathed, holding the line where my own strength ended.
We are, she whispered. One hearth. One fire. Long lost sisters.
The refrain locked, solid as the slate under the tent: Sister.
A sob broke from my throat, raw and ugly. I leaned forward, my forehead resting against Nell’s shoulder, my tears hot against her shirt. Her free arm came around my back, holding me against the solid, quiet hum of her own wolf.
“It’s okay,” Nell murmured. “You’re out of the gray. You’re allowed to feel it.”
I let the grief wash through me, the shame of the rows, the memories of my mother, the terrifying questions about the future. I cried until my ribs ached and the breath came clean.
The silence that followed was broken only by the soft voices of dozens of dormants outside.
Then, the light through the canvas flap turned green.
It wasn’t the soft green of spring leaves. It was a chemical, blistering glare, the color of rot, casting long, distorted shadows across the tent floor.
A Saint’s fire, fueled by their terrible magic.
Wren stood up, her hand pressing hard against her belly. “The ridge.”
Genny pulled the canvas back.
Down the slope, the fire didn’t leap from branch to branch like a normal forest fire. It slid over the ground, a thick, glowing carpet of emerald light that left the pines standing, but turned their needles to gray ash in seconds. The smoke rising from it was heavy, oily, staying low to the ground.
“The purge line,” Genny muttered, her teeth clicking together. She closed her eyes as if communicating with something unseen. “Levi says they’re—”
Suddenly, Wren gasped, her eyes turning wide and blank. Beside her, Nell went rigid, her fingers digging into the frame of the tent. Genny’s jaw locked, her eyes flashing gold as she stared into the distance.
“What is it?” I asked, looking between them. I could smell the sharp spike of their fear, but the air was silent to me.
Nadia stood beside me, her hands clutching her silver rings. “I can’t hear them. What’s Reed saying?”
“The containment lines are gone,” Nell said, her voice strained, her hand still gripping the wood. “The hotshots tried to backburn, but it didn’t work.”
“Reed says there’s a Verdant Order camp massing along the base of the ridge. They’re behind the fire.” Wren’s eyes snapped open and she looked around at all of us. “We have to get the dormants out of here. Brann’s ordered us out to help them get the trucks loaded.”
“It’s too late,” Genny snapped, her eyes returning to normal but her breath coming fast. “Levi says the scouts are already on the high gap. They’ve just bottled us in.”
“What about the ravine?” Nell asked, looking at Genny. “The old logging road?”
“Choked,” Genny said, her voice flat. “The wind is dumping all the green smoke down into the draw.”
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the tent.
Hotshots on the line, fighting a magical fire I suspected was set by a Saint.
A camp full of fifty women I’d both helped imprison and escape. Nadia and three pregnant wolves and their mates the only help in this camp.
And we were boxed in.
My stomach plummeted.
I’d help do this.
We were going to be burned out or dragged back to the Harvest Floor.
I leaned against the wooden crate, my skin burning, my mind racing. The Steward’s training—the logistics, the search-and-seizure protocols I had memorized—spun in my head.
Then the dark thought came.
It was a quiet, cold voice, whispering from the corners of my mind.
You have the uniform.