16 Tommy #2
Both hands on the keypad. His back turned, his weight forward, attention fully on entering the code to the glowing lock, and in that moment I was the least interesting thing in the corridor—a wet, chemical-bleached, blistered idiot shuffling in place and going nowhere.
My wolf couldn’t smell a thing through Nadia’s blanket. But it was still watching.
In the service corridor that ran parallel to this one, separated by a span of reinforced glass, a figure in a uniform was moving the wrong direction for patrol schedule.
I caught it in my peripheral vision—caught the bearing first, the particular angle of the shoulders, the measured unhurried stride—and something in my chest locked down hard and held its breath.
I knew that gait.
I’d catalogued it in the dark of a catwalk in this building, standing hip-to-hip with Kaia while the things on the stage below bent the light. My wolf had filed it the same night it filed the sound of Sloane’s voice: I was starting to think she’d die in that uniform.
Sloane was alive and still inside.
The guard was still bent over the keypad. I did not move. Did not turn my head. The glass was between us and he was six feet away, and whatever the next six seconds gave me was all I was going to get.
She walked past the window without slowing, without looking.
Pale eyes fixed on the far end of the service corridor, short dark hair, the same flat controlled pace she’d used on every floor of this building for however long she’d been running this particular game.
And just as she reached the edge of the glass panel—the last half-second before the wall took her—her hand came up off her thigh.
Palm flat. Dropped and gone.
The signal she’d used in the service corridor behind the catwalk the night it all broke open. I’m not the problem.
Then the wall took her and the corridor stood empty and I was looking at nothing.
The lock clicked and the gate open. I shuffled forward.
She’s in. She stayed. She’s still running.
Right behind the relief came the question I had no way to ask: she’d had the flat black card that bought us the Harvest Floor.
The packs were coming. Reed’s fire was going to fall on this building’s wards.
And when it did, we needed someone on the inside who could help us blow the doors all the way open, not just one floor, not just the elevator lock—everything.
Every gate. Every ward seal. All of it at once.
She’d spent months clearing that tunnel. She knew this building the way you know a prison from the inside. If anyone had found the thread that unraveled the whole thing, it was her.
I had no way to ask. She was gone past the glass. The guard had his hand on my arm.
I filed the question in the same drawer as Kaia’s pulse under my mouth, and every other thing I was carrying that had no answer yet.
Soon.
The air changed thirty feet down the corridor.
The sterile horror peeled away and the lavender came up to meet me, soft and thick and oppressive, that crafted, expensive, we are healing you here smell pumped through every vent, and I somehow hated it more now than I had on the first day.
My boots hit the linoleum of Dormitory B and the whole soft lie closed over me like water, and somebody yelled my name.
“Tommy!”
Eli hit me at a dead run.
The kid’s skinny arms went around my ribs hard enough to make the burns sing, and I bit down on the wince and got an arm around his shoulders before he could feel me flinch. He was shaking. Trembling like a struck wire, his face buried in my wet flannel, and the words came out of him in a flood.
“They took you so long, they took you for days, nobody would tell me anything, and then the bells went off and there were—people said there were monsters, they said the lower floors broke open and there were monsters in the halls and people screaming, and I thought—” He pulled back and scrubbed his face with his sleeve and his eyes were red-rimmed and nineteen and terrified. “I thought you were dead, man.”
Something in my chest cracked clean open. The wolf, even blanketed, leaned toward the kid. Pack. Small. Protect.
“Hey. Hey, no.” I gripped the back of his neck, steady, the way you’d hold something that might fly apart. “Look at me. I’m a hard guy to kill. It’s annoying, honestly, people have tried.”
A wet hiccup that wanted to be a laugh.
Then they were on me—Livia and Marisol, the two of them coming through the cluster of patients with that smooth practiced care, and Livia caught my forearm before I could pull it back and turned it toward the light, and her breath went in sharp at the red chemical blisters rising along the skin.
“Oh, no.” Her thumb hovered over the worst of them, not touching, her brow folding up with a concern so genuine it made me want to put my fist through the lavender-scented wall.
“Who did this to you? This is—this isn’t right, this isn’t how we—” She looked up at Marisol, and Marisol’s calm face had gone tight.
“I’ll get the burn salve from the dispensary. Sit him down. Eli, get him water.”
And there it was, the thing that sat in my gut like a swallowed coal.
They meant it. Livia’s hands were already moving to help, Marisol was already steering me toward a cot, and somewhere in their heads I was a patient who’d been mishandled and they were the ones who’d set it right.
They thought they worked at a sanctuary.
They handed out water and burn salve and gentle words, and under their feet a man with blue weeping eyes was deciding when I was ripe enough to gut, and they would go to their graves never knowing they were the pretty face on the front of the grinder.
Except, my pack was coming to burn this place down and change all of it.
I let Marisol push me down onto the cot. I let Livia disappear for her salve. I dropped a heavy hand on Eli’s shoulder when he came back with the water, and I went back to work.
“Relax, kid, seriously.” I knocked my knuckles against the cup he handed me.
“It was just a mix-up with my spa package. Turns out the deluxe wellness flush is not hypoallergenic. You should’ve seen the mud mask they tried on me before this.
I told ‘em, I said, I’m allergic to wellness, it’s a documented condition, and they didn’t believe me, and now look.
” I held up the blistered arm like a winning lottery ticket.
“Vindicated. Worst Yelp review of my life and I’m writing it the second I get my phone back. ”
Eli laughed for real this time, the fear loosening out of his shoulders an inch, and my free hand had started up a fast hard drum against my thigh without my asking it to, bleeding off the adrenaline still sawing through me, the not-healed burns, the unspent everything.
Livia came back and worked the cool salve over my arm with the gentlest hands I’d felt since—
Since the iron box. Since Kaia had shaken apart against my mouth.
And like the thought had summoned her, steps clicked in the corridor.
I knew the cadence before I knew anything else. Precise. Measured. A rhythm I’d memorized in a hallway, and my whole body turned toward the open doorway before my brain signed off on it.
Kaia.
She crossed the gap of the doorway without slowing, spine drawn up into that gray column, chin level, eyes forward—and beside her walked a Warden I didn’t know.
Not Miller. Never Miller again. Miller was two pieces of cooling meat on a sublevel floor because this woman had torn a lifetime of cement off her own bones and opened his throat to save me, and the savage satisfaction of that landed in my chest right alongside everything else and made the drumming on my thigh go still.
Her scent reached me a half-second behind her.
Muffled. Sanded down by Nadia’s potion and buried in the high collar of her uniform—but my nostrils flared and caught the thread of it underneath anyway, warm stone and that green storm-note that was hers and only ever hers.
The wolf came up off the floor of me snarling against its blanket, and a rumble started low in my chest, so deep it rattled my own ribs, a sound I clamped my jaw down on hard enough to taste blood.
She didn’t turn her head. She didn’t break stride.
But two fingers of her right hand came up off her thigh as she passed the door, and tapped. Once, twice, three times—a quick silent rhythm against the gray linen, fast, deliberate, there and gone.
And though she hadn’t said the words out loud, I knew what she meant—
I love you.
Then the boots carried her on down the corridor, and the muffled green of her went with her, and I was up off the cot and into the doorway before Livia finished smoothing the salve, planting myself in the exact patch of air where Kaia had just been, letting the last fading warmth of her settle down over me like something I could wear.
“Was that Steward Kaia?” Livia said.
“I think so,” Marisol said. “We should tell her about these burns. She’ll want to report it.”
The corridor stretched away under its reinforced hex-glass, sealed and quiet and lined with locked doors, and she was already nearly to the end of it, walking away to go play my jailer.
I stood there in the lavender stink with my skin burning and my cock aching and the wolf clawing at the inside of my throat.
I leaned my shoulder against the doorframe.
I leaned until the metal gave a low groan under my weight, until I felt it want to bend, and I kept the gold out of my eyes and the snarl behind my teeth and I watched her go, and I tapped my thigh three times.