13. Erin
ERIN
He takes me down to the dock at eight with two mugs and a demeanor of walking to a disciplinary hearing.
The whole afternoon I've been inventing theories. Most of them were bad. The best one involved a wife, and I sat with that for an hour and discovered some extremely unwelcome information about my own feelings. Nash sits on the boards and hands me a mug.
"There's a thing that happens to wolves," he says. "Not all of us. Maybe half in a generation, and nobody can predict it. Hazel's notebooks call it recognition. Everyone else says mates."
"Mates."
"It isn't a preference. It's not falling for someone.
" His eyes are locked on the water. "It's the first second you're in the same air as a specific person, and every system you've got reports at once, and it says that one, permanently, with no appeal.
My mother had it with my father. Caleb had it with Isla in a school hallway when they were eleven, which she has never let him live down. "
The dock is very quiet. Somewhere behind us the generator hums.
"Nash."
"It happened when I set eyes on you," he says. "You'd said maybe six words. You had coffee on your sleeve and you seemed annoyed, and it hit me hard enough that I had to hold the tailgate. Every day since I've stacked a wall between you and that information."
I set my mug down carefully because my hands aren't reliable.
"That's why," I say. "The nineteen minutes from a twenty-six-minute drive. The bridge. You knew before the wood cracked because you were listening for it. You were always listening for it."
"Yes."
I stand up. I need to move; it's what I do with things too big to hold sitting down. The water's gone silver and flat and the whole valley smells like woodsmoke and cold water.
"Okay. I have questions and some of them are going to be rude."
"Good," Nash says, and I hear real relief in it. "Rude I can answer."
"Does it go both ways? Am I supposed to be feeling something?"
"Sometimes it's mutual and immediate. More often the human half feels a pull they can't explain and it takes months, or years, or never." He turns to face me finally. "Never is allowed. It isn't a contract. It's not binding on you. It happened to me, not to us."
"But it's binding on you."
"Completely."
"So there's no version where you meet someone else in five years and build a nice life."
"No."
I stop pacing. "Nash, that's awful."
He laughs, startled and rough. "It's not, generally. Ask my mother. But I take your point."
Here's what I do, because I am who I am: I go and get my notebook.
He watches me come back down the dock with it and doesn't say a word about the timing.
"I need to work through this in writing or I'll do it badly in my head," I tell him. "Interrupt if I'm wrong."
"Go."
"Problem one. I don't have a control." I flip to a clean page.
"I met you at the pinnacle of the worst professional year of my life, isolated in a strange county, while somebody was breaking into my cabin.
I've been under continuous threat since day dot, and you've been the person removing the threat every single time.
That's not romance, that's conditioning.
There's years of literature on misattribution of arousal, and I've been marinating in the exact conditions that produce it. "
"That's fair."
"Problem two is worse, and it's yours." I look up. "You've known from day one. Every kindness you've shown me has been performed by someone with an interest. How am I supposed to weigh the jar of arnica or six loaner cameras when the person handing them over was hardwired to hand them over?"
Nash takes that one on the chin. He thinks before he answers, which I've come to expect and still find remarkable.
"You can't," he says. "Not from those. So weigh the ones with a cost." He counts on his fingers, unhurried.
"The bond told me to keep you. I gave you the road out and the keys.
It said to hold on to what I know. I gave you sixty-one names and my father's cheek swab.
" His mouth twists. "I'm telling you, tonight, before you've had a chance to want me on your own, because you deserve the information more than I deserve the odds. "
I write nothing at all in the notebook.
I sit down next to him with my legs hanging over the water. Our shoulders are touching again.
"I won't tell you what I feel tonight," I say. "That's not cruelty. It's that I've made two large decisions recently and I'd like to make the third one slowly, with all the facts, the same as anything else worth getting right."
"That's exactly what I want."
"Don't be too gracious about it, I'm rattled." I bump his shoulder with mine. "But for the record, Hanson, the pull's there. I noticed it days before you told me it had a name. I filed it under 'inconvenient' and kept ignoring it."
He is still beside me. Then he laughs, low and disbelieving, and drops his head.
"Days."
The elders come at nine at Nash's house and we lay the papers out on the long table, and the mood goes underwater fast.
Hazel goes silent over the polygon map. Owen reads the roster twice. Grace stands behind me with a palm on the rear of my chair and says nothing, which from her is a scream.
I take the shipping paperwork, because that's the pile nobody else wants and it's where the truth always is.
Procurement records are boring on purpose.
They're also the only documents in any organization that can't lie, because somebody has to actually receive the thing.
It takes me two hours and a pot of tea to find it.
"Nash. Get me the disappearance map."
He brings it. I put the two side by side and start marking with a red pencil, and my heart's racing, and I have to stop twice to be sure I'm not seeing a pattern just because I want one.
"There are shipping manifests in here for a hauler out of Deerlick.
Nine consignments since November, all outbound, all listed as drill core, geological, non-hazardous.
" I tap the dates. "Now here's the thing.
Rock doesn't need this. Every single one of these consignments has a temperature-controlled trailer, a two-hour maximum dwell time, and a live-load requirement, and four of them are signed for by someone with a veterinary credential number in the receiver field. "
Owen leans in. "They're moving them out as rock samples."
"And look at the dates." I run the pencil down the column. "My merchant colony fails just after this one. The Loon River wolves stop transmitting after this one. Ninth of May, that's three days ago, the drowned timber family."
Hazel puts her hand flat on the table.
"Every consignment," she says, "has a gap in the world beside it."
"Nine consignments. Nine polygons on their map." I lean back. "They're not sampling a region. They're working through a list. And whoever's giving them the list has been ahead of us since before I got here."