4. Chapter 4
Chapter four
Alex
The clothes are folded on the chair when I wake up.
I lie there looking at them for a moment, then get up.
Not all new. Most of it has been worn and washed and worn again — soft in the right places, broken in without being tired.
Good taste, close to my size, nothing institutional about any of it.
A few pieces still have tags. I turn a henley over in my hands and think about Dalton making calls in the dark while I was asleep, whoever picked up, whatever that conversation looked like.
I put it down and keep going.
Black. I keep coming back to black. Not grey — black is a different thing entirely, black is chosen. A shirt that fits across my shoulders without pulling. Jeans that move when I move, dark and close. I pull the boots on last, lace them up, stand straight.
Yes. That.
Under all of it, the blue set. Dalton's blue, the one that's almost violet, soft against my skin, and nobody in that building is going to know about it and that's exactly the point.
I find the make-up in a bag on the counter. Mascara, foundation, blush, eye liner, moisturizer, lip gloss. This is too much, I zip up the bag. Then stop. Open it up, grab the lip gloss and close it.
I love my clothes, the rest can wait.
I look at myself in the small mirror above the bathroom sink. Someone looks back who doesn't look like a resident.
I pick up my campus map and go.
***
The dining hall is warmer than yesterday, or maybe I'm just more prepared for it. I get coffee and eggs and find the table near the window, the one that faces the treeline, and I eat and let the morning happen around me.
Dalton is somewhere behind me. I don't look for him — I feel the bond running warm and know he's there, close enough that nothing gets past him, far enough that nobody watching would connect us. Two days in and we've already found the rhythm of it without discussing it.
The room fills. Students in clusters, loud near the center, quieter at the edges. Someone laughing too hard at something. Someone else with headphones already somewhere else.
I'm eating eggs in a dining hall and nobody is watching me for signs of instability and I'm wearing black jeans that fit and there is coffee in my hand.
Becky comes in with two girls I don't know, all three of them mid-conversation, her dark hair down today. She sees me across the room and raises a hand.
I raise mine back.
She nods and keeps moving to her table. The two girls with her glance over. I look back at my eggs.
That's enough. That's the right amount of Becky for a Tuesday morning.
I finish my coffee, check the map, and go find mythology.
***
Tomlinson is already at the front of the room when I walk in, jacket off, sleeves rolled, writing notes on the board. He glances up when I come through the door and nods once and goes back to writing.
I find a seat near the middle.
Tomlinson caps his marker and turns around and the room settles without him asking it to. He has the kind of presence that doesn't announce itself — it's just there, and the room responds before anyone decides to.
"We're continuing the transformation unit," he says. "Specifically — the boundary between human and animal in Arctic and Inuit tradition." He leans back against the desk. "Someone summarize where we left off."
A girl two seats down gives a clean summary — the permeability of form, the idea that human and animal aren't fixed categories in these traditions but states that can shift. Tomlinson listens. Doesn't interrupt, doesn't nod along on autopilot. Just takes it in.
"Good," he says. "Today I want to look at a specific story. I'm going to tell it rather than hand you a text, because it exists in oral tradition and it lands differently that way."
He tells it straight. In his voice, even and unhurried.
A hunter. A winter that went longer than it should have. He'd been tracking a wolf for days — not for any reason he could name. Just following, the way you follow something when you've stopped being able to explain why.
The cold got into him. The silence settled in after. At some point he stopped counting days and stopped thinking in words and just moved the way the wolf moved, reading the same wind, reading the same shadows under the trees.
He found his way back eventually. Walked into the village on his own feet, wearing his own face.
But he stood at the edge of it for a long time first.
Tomlinson pauses there.
He stood at the treeline and watched the people moving between the fires and he knew them. Knew their names. Knew which children belonged to which families. He knew all of it and still couldn't make himself walk in.
Because from the treeline they looked like something observed, not something he was part of. And he didn't know how to cross that distance again. Didn't know which step was the one that made him one of them instead of something watching them.
The elders saw him standing there.
They didn't send men out to bring him in. Didn't raise an alarm. One of them — an old woman — walked to the edge of the settlement and sat down in the snow. Not close. Not far. Just within sight. She brought food. She didn't offer it. Just set it down and sat with her hands in her lap and waited.
Others came. Not all at once. Over time. They built a small fire. They talked to each other, not to him — about ordinary things.
And slowly, over time, he came back. Not because they pulled him. Because they stayed close enough that he could remember what it felt like to be inside it.
Some come back, Tomlinson says. His voice the same throughout — even, unhurried. Some don't. And the ones who do are never entirely one thing again.
It isn’t treated as a tragedy.
Just a fact.
The village found ways to hold what he'd become. He found ways to live inside it.
That’s where the story ends.
The room doesn’t move when he finishes.
I'm looking at the table. My pen is flat under my fingers and I've stopped writing and I don't pick it up again. I think about RJ at the fence. His thumb through the chain link, finding my marks. His howl, still lodged somewhere behind my sternum.
I breathe. I don't look up.
"What do the elders understand," Tomlinson asks the room, "that a different community might not?"
The discussion opens. Students talk about liminality, about fixed categories, about what it means to sit with someone instead of fixing them. Tomlinson asks questions until the ideas sharpen.
I don't say anything.
***
When the class ends I take my notes and walk down to the athletic complex on the far side of the grounds. Padded floors, climbing walls, an obstacle course along the far wall, the ceiling going up two stories.
Coach Reeves is already there. Older, with the build of someone who has been training for decades and means it.
"Physical Development," she says, to the group assembling near the door. "Strength, endurance, self-defense, situational awareness. Partner up. We're starting with grappling."
I scan the room. Nobody I know. I end up beside a girl with her hair pulled back tight who looks at me, looks at my boots, and raises an eyebrow.
"Those are going to be a problem," she says.
"They won't," I say.
Her name is Sasha. She's fast and technically solid and in the first two minutes she figures out this pairing isn't what she expected. She stops trying to outmuscle me and starts trying to outthink me instead, which is more interesting for both of us.
Coach Reeves moves through the pairs calling corrections. She gets to us and stops and watches for a moment without saying anything. Moves on.
By the end of class Sasha is breathing hard and I'm not and she looks at me.
"Tomorrow?" she says.
"Sure," I say.
I walk to the dining hall for lunch — soup, bread, some vegetable medley— and find the same window table and eat and think about the hunter at the edge of the village and Tomlinson's voice and the way the room went quiet at the end of it.
Some come back. Some don't. The ones who do are never entirely one thing again.
***
Writing 101 meets after lunch in a smaller room on the second floor, eight students and Dr. Clary at the front with a stack of photocopied poems on the desk. Becky is two seats to my left. She clocks me when I sit down and goes back to her notebook without saying anything.
"We've been working on close reading," Dr. Clary tells me. "Analyzing what a text is doing under the surface. Today — Mary Oliver. Wild Geese." She slides a copy across to me. "Read it once before we start."
I read it.
I read it again.
It isn’t asking for perfection.
It isn’t asking for control.
Just that you exist. That you belong anyway.
The discussion opens and students talk about mercy and belonging and what it means to not have to be good.
I sit with the photocopy in my hands and say nothing.
There's a line near the middle that I read three times and then turn face-down on the desk because I can't look at it in a room full of people who don't know what it costs to let your body want what it wants when what it wants is somewhere you can't reach.
I write down what Dr. Clary says. I write down what the other students say.
I don't add my own.
***
The library is quieter in the late afternoon, a few students at the long tables with the focused look of people actually working. I find a table near the back, away from the windows, and spread out the syllabi and handouts and the campus-issued laptop.
I start with mythology. Most interesting, least behind.
I read. I take notes. Someone's pencil on paper nearby. The heating system. A chair scraping two tables over. My coffee goes cold while I'm not paying attention to it.
That's when I feel it.
Not the bond.
The air shifts — a stillness settling over the room that I recognize from Feral Academy. From common rooms. Corridors. From the way everything changes when Lumi is somewhere nearby.
I look up.
She's two tables away. Textbook open. Coffee in hand. Frosthaven hoodie pulled close. Head down, highlighter moving steadily across the page.
She could have been there ten minutes. She could have just sat down. She doesn't look up.
I close my laptop and move to her table.
She makes room without being asked — shifts her textbook, sets the highlighter aside, wraps both hands around her coffee cup. We sit in the quiet for a moment without speaking.
"You're a student," I say.
"Second year," she says.
"Here. At Frosthaven. With a library card and a hoodie and—" I glance at her book. "Advanced biology."
"Yes."
"At Feral Academy you're staff. You meet with residents, you—" I stop. "Here you're just sitting in the library with a highlighter."
"Yes."
"Why."
She looks down at her coffee. Not avoiding — choosing where to begin.
"I still need to finish school," she says. "And Frosthaven made sense. For what I'm wanting to do." She lifts her eyes. "At Feral Academy I have a title. People know what I am. Here I'm a second-year who studies in the east wing."
The library moves around us — pages turning, quiet footsteps, the low hum of people trying not to be heard.
"I didn't realize you were still a student," I say. "You told me once, but I didn't really—" I shake my head. "It changes things. Knowing you're here."
She watches me. "How."
"At Feral Academy you're Lumi." I search for it. "There's distance in that. Even when you're sitting right next to me." I glance at her cup. "Here you're just a person. In a hoodie. With cold coffee."
"The coffee was hot when I sat down," she says.
"It's cold now."
"Yes," she says quietly. "It is."
Her hands tighten slightly around the cup. Something in her face goes briefly unguarded — younger, less assembled — before it settles back.
"Is it strange," I ask, "going back and forth between what you are there and what you are here."
She considers that. "Sometimes," she says. "Mostly it's just what needs doing."
"That's a very Lumi answer."
Her mouth shifts. "What would a very Alex answer be."
"I'd say it's exhausting," I say. "And then I'd do it anyway."
She studies me for a second — then laughs. Quiet, real, unguarded. The same thing that moved through her face a moment ago, back again and staying longer this time.
"You're not wrong," she says.
I lean back and take a breath.
"Can I ask you something," I say.
She waits.
"The staring. The whispers. People moving out of my way in the corridor before I'm close enough to be in their way." I look at my hands on the table. "Is that me. Is that what I do all the time or only when something's wrong."
Lumi is quiet for a moment.
"It's you," she says. "All the time. You don't have an off switch for it." She holds my gaze. "Most alphas learn to modulate. Tone it down in neutral situations, let it surface when they need it." A pause. "You never learned that. You were never taught."
"So I'm just—" I stop.
"Present," she says. "Fully. All the time. People feel it before they know what they're feeling." She tilts her head slightly. "Have you noticed it's worse in enclosed spaces."
I think about the corridor after mythology. The dining hall. The classroom where the girl stopped with her hand still on the door.
"Yes," I say.
"That will get easier," she says. "When you understand what you're doing. Right now you're broadcasting without meaning to."
I sit with that.
"My memory," I say. "The night Curtis died."
"I've been working on it."
"Here?"
She meets my eyes. "What you remember — documented properly, in front of the right person before the panel meets. That's what we're building toward."
"Tomlinson," I say.
She doesn't look away.
"He's good people. He’s not performing kindness," she says. "There's no angle."
We sit with that for a moment, the quiet settling again around us.
"How are you," she asks.
I think about the day. The clothes on the chair. The mirror. Eggs and Becky's wave. Tomlinson's voice and the poem I turned face-down. Lumi's laugh, unexpected and real. All of it held together without falling apart.
"Better than yesterday," I say.
She holds my gaze.
"Good."