24. Gideon
GIDEON
I have told this story exactly once before, to a federal agent in an office in Olympia who wrote it down and did nothing. I'm about to tell it a second time, to a woman cleaning her father's rifles in a kitchen on a mountain, and I already know she'll do more with it than the government did.
So I start where it started.
"I was born into a pack that manufactured alphas," I say.
"That's the plain version. Upstate, a family called Bramwell, and they'd figured out that the old dynasties wanted more alphas than nature was handing them and would pay for the difference.
So the Bramwells made up the difference.
They took promising beta children and they ran them through a program, and the ones it worked on came out alpha, and the ones it didn't come out of came out as something the Bramwells made disappear. "
She doesn't flinch. She keeps her eyes on me and her hands still on the table, giving me the room, and I use it.
"It worked on about three in ten. I was one of the three.
" I turn my hands over on the oilcloth so she can see the wrists, the old white scarring that rings them like bracelets I'll never take off.
"This is from the training. They start you at five.
There's a serum, daily, to push the designation, and there's physical conditioning to build the aggression and the dominance, and the conditioning involves wire.
Wrists, mostly. Adjusted at night, tighter as you grow, so the body learns to strain against a thing and call it strength.
I don't remember most of the years between five and ten.
The body protects you from some things by not keeping them.
But I remember the wire being tightened in the dark.
And I remember the smell of the serum going in. "
This is the part. I make myself say it, because she said cedar, because she put her own floor-taking word on the table first.
"It smelled like cinnamon. Raw cinnamon bark, the real thing, not the sweet kitchen version.
They'd warm it before they dosed us, I don't know why, and the whole room would fill with it, and then the needle.
Five years old. Every day. So now." I spread my hands.
"Now I can't be near it. Cinnamon. Any of it.
It puts me right back on that table with the wire on my wrists and the needle coming.
The clove I chew, that I started chewing the day I left, because I needed something to put in the space where that smell used to live.
I picked my own scent to bury the one they gave me.
The clove is mine. The cinnamon is theirs, and I don't let them have me anymore. "
"And the wolf?" she asks, because of course she would. Hers is the locked room she's lived next to her whole life. "If they made you alpha, did they make the wolf too?"
"They woke one. Whether it was always in me or whether the serum built it, I've never known, and there's nobody left alive to ask.
" I keep my hands flat on the table. "It came up late and it came up wrong, and it has never felt like mine.
It feels installed. So I don't wear it unless I have to, and I haven't had to in years.
The others run the lines on four legs. I stitch what comes back.
We've all made our arrangements with what we are. "
"Gideon." Just my name, quiet. Not pity. She doesn't do pity, which is why I can keep going.
"There's one more thing, and it's about you, not me.
" I look at her across the table. "I told Rhys the first night that your wolf was caged.
That somebody locked it down and kept it locked for years.
I knew what I was looking at because the program did exactly that, to some of us.
A shifter who can't reach the wolf is a shifter you can control.
No fast healing, no four legs to run on, no animal at the surface to fight you when you give an order.
It's a leash you build on the inside, out of the right drugs given young enough and long enough, layered under conditioning so the shifter half believes the cage is just how they're made.
" I keep my voice level, because this is the part she needs clean, not soft.
"Your father didn't invent that. But it's the same idea.
The suppressants you bought off your pharmacist weren't only burying your scent, Ember.
They were the top layer keeping the cage shut.
That's why you've never shifted. It was done to you, on purpose, by someone who wanted you trainable and tradeable and never able to run on four legs from either. "
She goes very still. I watch her turn it over, the thing she's lived inside her whole life suddenly given a mechanism, a reason, a hand that built it.
"It's not that I can't," she says slowly. "It's that I was made not to."
"Yes."
"Can it be undone."
"I don't know," I tell her, because she'd know a comfortable lie when she heard one.
"The drugs are out of you, near enough, days now.
That's one layer gone. The rest is older and went in deeper.
I won't promise you a door I can't open.
" A breath. "But I'll tell you this. A cage that takes that much work to keep shut wants to open.
It's been pushing on the bars your whole life.
That's the wolf you feel when you can't reach it.
It's still in there. It never stopped trying. "
"There was a boy named Caleb. He didn't make it.
There was a woman who came and read to me, I never knew if she was kin or hired, who gave me a book about a doctor named Galen who lived two thousand years ago and kept careful notes about how bodies work.
I still have the book. I rebound it three times.
" A breath. "And there was a boy in the cot next to mine, the same age, going through the same protocol on the same schedule.
We learned to keep each other quiet when the wire got bad.
We learned the program together, the way you learn anything with the person in the next bed. His name was Varen."
The kitchen holds still around the name.
"He made it through same as I did. Came out alpha same as I did.
The difference between us is that when our ten years of service were up, I took everything I'd copied down over half my life and walked it to a government office, and Varen stayed.
Varen liked what they made him. Varen's good at it, better than me, always was, because he never spent a single night wishing he was something else.
" I look at her. "And somewhere along the way the Bramwell program found a new patron with deeper pockets.
A man named Augustus Easton, who funded the whole operation for years because the Easton dynasty wanted alphas the way all the old families want alphas.
Which is how a boy from my childhood ends up walking up your mountain wearing Easton colors. "
She's quiet a moment, putting it together, fast, the way she puts everything together.
"So when the Eastons come," she says.
"Varen comes with them. He's their best. He'll know me in the first second, the way I'd know him, because there's no hiding what we are from each other, we were built in the same room.
" I keep my voice level because level is the only way I can say it.
"And I'm going to have to kill him. The boy from the next cot.
There's no version of this where that doesn't happen, and I've had two days in the woods to look at it from every side, and it always ends the same.
So I came back to tell you, because you asked who Varen was, and because I'd rather you heard all of it from me than watched my face when I see him and had to guess. "
I'm done. I've set the whole of it on the table next to the brown drawing and the brittle notebook and her father's rifle, and I feel emptied out and strangely light, the way you feel after a wound's finally been cleaned.
She doesn't say she's sorry. She doesn't reach for words at all.
She gets up from her chair. Comes around the table, slow, careful of the leg, and stands in front of me, and I look up at her, and she takes my scarred wrist in both her hands, gentle, and turns it over and looks at the white rings the wire left, and then she does the thing no one has done in the twenty-two years since I walked out of that place.
She sits down in my lap, careful, and puts her arms around me, and holds me. Not as a patient. Not as an alpha. As a man who was a child on a table once and carried the proof of it in a leather roll for two decades.
I go very still. My hands don't know where to land. It's been so long since anyone held me that my body's forgotten how to be held, and I sit there rigid for a moment with this woman's arms around me and the iron going out of my spine one degree at a time.
"Ember," I say. I don't know what I mean by it. Her name's just the only word I have.
"Gideon," she says, into my neck, and there's a question in it under the comfort, the same door held open she's held open all along.
I bring my arms up and hold her back. Finally. Like a man remembering a language.
"Yes," I say.