A Bed Built Wrong for Three Alphas

Robyn Bracken has spent three years as a records clerk at Cairn Ridge while the Placement panel keeps ruling that her scent profile places poorly.

She enters her own name for Trial Week anyway: seven dated days in a nest unit at eight thousand feet with three alphas she has never met, a compatibility report due Friday, and a written right to leave any morning before eight.

She does not leave. She drags the bed off the wall, refuses the paired-scent exercise, and watches Halvor, Danny, and Kwabena rearrange the week around the room she has set.

By Wednesday the four of them are an accidental household, piled into a bed built for two and a half with the window open two inches on eight thousand feet of black air.

That night she reads the assessor's log and learns the week she thought she was passing has been a failure since the first hour, just as the panel offers her everything she has wanted for three years if she files three names on Friday and leaves one of them off.