9. Erin
ERIN
Iwake up in a bed that isn't mine, under a quilt with a pattern of pine trees stitched around the border, and for about three seconds I have no idea what has happened to my life.
Then my ribs report in, and my wrist, and the whole image comes back at once, the door in the hillside, the undercut bank, five steps out of cover and then a thing my eyes refused to comprehend.
I lie still and stare at the ceiling boards and run the standard diagnostic.
Head injury? No. Hypoxia? No. Ingested anything?
Half a granola bar and creek water. Corroborating witnesses? Armed men, dogs, and a helicopter.
There's a glass of water on the nightstand, a folded change of clothes, and my field notebooks — all six of them, stacked oldest to newest, with the core samples lined up beside them in a plastic tray somebody sourced from a kitchen.
I sit up too fast, swear at my ribs, and go looking for the world.
The compound is a village. I expected bunkers, or a lodge, or something with a gate and a purpose when I got here.
Past the porch are eleven or twelve houses set in a fold of shoreline, gardens, a woodlot, a shed with a tractor half-disassembled, and a clothesline strung with what is unmistakably a child's dinosaur pajamas.
Two boys are arguing about a soccer ball. An old woman is pruning something with total absorption. Somebody's frying bacon.
Grace finds me on the steps before I've made it any further. She's got silver hair over one shoulder and a mug in each hand, and she sits down beside me on the cold boards like she's known me for years, but hasn't.
"He's asleep," she says. "Finally. I put something in his tea that he pretended not to notice."
"How's the shoulder?"
"Closed. It'll be pink by tonight and gone by Sunday." She hands me a mug. "Ask the question you're actually holding."
I take a breath. "Rate?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Healing rate. Through-and-through soft tissue, closed in under twelve hours.
That's not fast healing, that's a different metabolic reality.
" My voice is doing something unsteady, so I speed up.
"Which implies caloric demand I can't account for, which implies a resting requirement that would be visible in any population study, which implies — how many calories, Grace? A day. Roughly."
Grace considers her tea. "Owen eats about four thousand and he's retired. Nash eats seven and he's insufferable about it."
"Seven thousand." I put my head in my hands. "That's a large-carnivore energy budget in a bipedal frame."
"Is that helping?"
"Enormously," I say, and mean it.
Owen comes down from the woodlot with sawdust on his sleeves and sits on the step below us two hours later, which I later understand is deliberate. He puts himself lower than me. He talks for an hour without once telling me I've had a shock.
He gives me the truth. Shifting is heritable, expressed at puberty, and doesn't skip; a child of two wolves is a wolf. Mixed pairings run about half. Gestation is human. Lifespan is human plus fifteen or twenty years, weighted toward the good end.
"You're giving me a pedigree study," I say.
"I'm giving you what you'd ask for." He shrugs. "You want the mystical version, Hazel does it better and she'll charge you a pot of tea."
"Why isn't there a fossil record? Why isn't there a genome record? People have sequenced wolves for thirty years, you can't hide a chromosome…"
"You could ask Grace to put a swab in a tube for you."
I stop. "What?"
"You've got kits in that duffel. Wyatt brought everything." Owen's blue eyes crinkle. "Nobody here's afraid of your microscope, Erin. We're afraid of what somebody with money would do with the answer. Those aren't the same fear."
I understand that I have just been handed the single most valuable biological sample of the century, freely.
Isla takes me around noon because, she says, everyone is going to stare anyway and it's less awful if there's structure.
She's got dark curls and a teacher's voice and a way of introducing me as "Erin, she's the biologist, she's the one who found the drill cores" — as though I've come with credentials rather than as a problem.
The old woman with the pruning shears turns out to be Hazel, who eyes me over her glasses and says, "You're the state girl.
You've got sensible boots. That's a start," and goes back to her currants.
I enter a kitchen with nine people in it and a griddle going.
I get pushed onto a bench between a teenager doing chemistry homework and a woman braiding her daughter's hair.
Somebody puts a plate down for me to eat.
The conversation is about the tractor, about whether the culvert on the east road is going to wash out again, about a wedding in July and whether the tent can be borrowed.
Twice somebody asks me a question about the lake and listens to the whole answer.
Caleb comes in, kisses Isla on the temple, steals bacon off her plate, and gets his hand slapped. He glances at me with those amber eyes and says, entirely deadpan, "Morning. Sorry about the screaming dogs."
"You were the pony."
"I've been called worse."
I laugh. It comes out cracked and startles me, because I haven't laughed in a while.
Here's what nobody warned me about. I have spent eleven years in field camps and faculty lounges and I have never once been in a room like this.
Not a militia. Not a cult. A neighborhood, with grudges about culverts and a shared tent, where people have kept a secret for four generations by simply loving each other more than they wanted to be known.
I have never belonged to anything like that. I didn't know it was on the menu. Nash finds me down by the water in the afternoon.
He moves stiffly. The shirt collar shows a line of pink where a hole was twelve hours ago, and I make myself not stare at it.
"You slept," I say.
"Under duress." He lowers himself beside me, careful with the shoulder. "You've been talking to my parents for six hours."
"Your mother told me your calorie intake and your father offered me a cheek swab. Your family has no operational security whatsoever."
"None. It's a miracle we're not in a zoo." He watches the water. "There's something I need to say before you hear it from anyone else, and I need you to actually hear it. You're not a prisoner here."
"Nash…"
"Let me get it out." He turns to face me.
"The road out is that one. There's a truck with keys in it.
The minute I can put you somewhere safe that isn't this valley, a different state, a different name if you want one, I'll arrange it and I'll drive you myself.
Nobody here gets a vote on that. Not the elders, not Caleb, not me. "
"You've just handed a stranger the location of every person you love."
"Yes."
"That's insane."
"Probably." His mouth does something rueful. "But the alternative is keeping you, and for weeks I've been deciding what you're allowed to know. I'm done making choices on your behalf. If you stay, it's because you chose it with the whole picture. That's the only version I want."
The breeze comes off the water. Behind us somebody's kid is shrieking about the soccer ball again, and it's the most ordinary sound in the world.
"Okay," I say. "Then I'm choosing to stay. Because there's a steel door in a hillside with a dead wolf's collar hanging on a nail beside it, and all I think about is what's behind it, and I'll need to borrow your microscope situation and possibly your father."
Nash exhales like he's been holding it since the ridge. "He'll be unbearable."
"I'm counting on it."