Chapter 5
Chapter five
The therapy building is separate from Red House.
Sven walks me outside to get to it — across the yard, past the enclosed fence line, toward a smaller structure set back near the tree line.
From out here I can see the full layout of the compound.
Three main buildings, spread in a loose triangle.
Red House behind me — dark, squat, reinforced.
A second building to the east that's bigger, modern-looking, with more windows.
That must be Orange or Gold. The third looks like a large lodge.
And then the smaller structures: a storage shed, something that might be a generator building, and the one we're walking toward.
Between the buildings, the enclosed yard — the one with the double fencing. Empty. No one pacing. I notice the absence and immediately resent myself for noticing.
The therapy building is single-story. Wood, not metal. It has actual curtains in the windows. Someone put a welcome mat at the door of a building.
Sven opens the door. Doesn't come in. Positions himself outside like a man who's done this handoff before and doesn't love it.
"Thirty minutes," he says. To me or to whoever's inside. Both.
The room is warm. Not Red House warm, which is the baseline temperature of a building that's trying not to freeze pipes.
Actually warm. There's a couch — soft, not bolted.
A chair across from it. A low table between them with a glass of water and a candle that's been lit, the flame small and steady.
The walls are painted a color that isn't gray.
Some kind of soft green. There are books on a shelf.
A plant in the corner that's somehow alive in Alaska in winter and it smells incredible in here. It’s a light fragrance, but I want to bottle it up.
It's the most normal room I've been in since I got here. Which means it's the most suspicious.
The woman standing by the window turns when I walk in.
She's young. Not much older than me. She's wearing a sweater that looks like it was chosen for comfort rather than authority, and her face has the kind of openness that immediately makes me want to check for the angle. Nobody in a facility looks at you like that without wanting something.
"Alex," she says. My name, not Alexandra. "I'm Lumi. Before you sit down — I'm not a therapist. I have a history of working with feral residents, and I'm good at it. I'm going to ask you questions. You're going to have space to ask me questions. Once a week. This isn't therapy. Relax and be open."
She says it the way you'd explain the rules of a card game.
"Sit wherever you'd like."
Two options. Couch or chair. The couch is softer and farther from the door. The chair is harder and closer to the exit.
I take the couch. Not because I trust her. Because I want to see what she does when I don't pick the defensive option.
What she does is sit in the chair across from me, tuck one leg underneath her, and wait.
She's good at waiting. Not the aggressive silence Gavin uses — the kind that pressures you into filling the space. This is different. Patient. Like she has nowhere to be and nothing to prove and whatever I do next is fine.
I don't trust it. But my shoulders drop about half an inch, which annoys me.
"How are you settling in?" she asks.
"Great. Love the decor. Very serial-killer-chic."
Her mouth twitches. Not a full smile. An acknowledgment. "Red House isn't designed for comfort."
"Red House isn't designed for humans."
She holds my gaze. Doesn't flinch. Doesn't correct me. Just lets that sentence sit in the room between us like I placed it on the table.
"What makes you say that?" she asks. Curious. Not clinical.
I think about Torres on the floor. The sound of his bones. The wolf.
"I've been in a lot of facilities. None of them electrified the fences."
"No. They wouldn't."
She says it simply. No denial. No deflection. No let's talk about how that made you feel. Just confirmation. Yes, this place is different. Yes, there's a reason.
It's the most honest anyone's been with me since I got here.
"I'd like to try something," Lumi says. "A settling exercise. It helps new placements — your system is running hot from the transfer and the new environment. I can help bring it down."
"Transition from what?"
"From wherever you were to wherever you are." She says it easily but her eyes do something quick. A flicker. Not down to her notes — she doesn't have notes. Down to my hands. My wrists. Back up. Fast enough that I almost miss it.
"It's simple," she continues. "Close your eyes. Focus on your breathing. I'll walk you through it."
I've done grounding exercises in every placement since I was fifteen. The psychological equivalent of turning it off and turning it back on again.
"Fine," I say. Because refusing would tell her more than complying.
I close my eyes.
"Breathe in through your nose," Lumi says.
Her voice is different now — lower, slower, with a steadiness that I feel in my chest before I process the words.
It's not a therapist voice. It's something else.
Something that my body responds to before my brain decides whether to let it.
"Hold it. Let it fill you up. Now out through your mouth. Slow."
I breathe. In. Hold. Out.
"Again. Slower this time. Let it settle."
In. Hold. Out. My heartbeat drops. Not by much — I can still feel it in my throat — but it drops. Which pisses me off, because I didn't give it permission to cooperate.
"Good. And this time, as you breathe, I want you to notice where you feel tension in your body. Don't try to fix it. Don't try to relax it. Just notice where it lives."
I notice. My shoulders — always. My jaw, which I've been clenching since the common room and probably since birth. The small of my back where I've been sleeping on a shit mattress for three nights. Standard places. Standard damage. I could list these in my sleep.
And my left wrist.
It's not tension. It's warmth. The same warmth that's been sitting under my skin since I walked through those gates, the one that flares when I'm near him and won't go away no matter how hard I press into it. Quiet now. Like a pilot light.
"Where do you feel it?" Lumi asks.
"Shoulders. Jaw."
"Anywhere else?"
I don't answer.
Lumi is quiet for a beat too long.
"Keep breathing," she says. "In through the nose. I want you to think about the last seventy-two hours. Not the events — not what happened. The feelings. What emotions have you had since arriving here?"
Anger. Confusion. Fear — though I'd rather chew glass than say that word out loud. And something else. The thing that has no name. The thing that started in the common room when pale eyes found mine through dark hair and my body reacted.
"Anger," I say. "Confusion."
"That's normal for a new placement." A pause. "Anything else?"
I open my eyes. She's watching me. Not my face — my left hand. Which is resting on my thigh, and my thumb is pressing into my wrist, and I didn't tell it to do that.
I stop. She looks up. Our eyes meet.
She knows. Whatever this is — she's seen it before.
"The Panel will ask about the night," Lumi says. Quiet. A shift in direction so smooth I almost miss that she changed the subject entirely. "The incident in your file. The one that brought you here."
My stomach drops. "Gavin already asked."
"Gavin documents. The Panel evaluates." She says it like there's a difference that matters. "When they ask — and they will — they'll want details. Sensory details. What you saw, heard, felt. What you remember and what you don't."
"I don't remember anything. I told Gavin that."
Lumi nods. Slow. "They didn't believe it when you told the police. They won't believe it when you tell the Panel."
She said they. Not I. I file that.
"What do you believe?" I ask.
"I believe that memory is complicated. Especially when the body does something the mind isn't ready to process.
" She holds my gaze. Steady. Warm in a way that I can't find the angle on, which terrifies me more than Gavin's clinical stare.
"I believe that what you don't remember might be more important than what you do.
And I believe that if you don't start understanding what's happening to you before the Panel makes its assessment, you won't get to decide what that understanding looks like. "
I should ask what she means. I should push. I should demand specifics — what's happening to me, what do you know, what is this place, what am I.
But she's already leaning forward where she picks up the glass of water and offers it to me.
"Drink. Grounding exercises can be dehydrating."
I take the water. Drink. My hand is steady. My pulse is not.
“Let’s take a few minutes to just breathe. Unless you’d like to journal.”
I shake my head.
Lumi settles back into her chair, closes her eyes and begins breathing deeply.
I don’t understand her strategy. Everyone else here treats me like a liability.
I sit and take in all of the room’s details. My gaze fixes on the candle flame.
Finally, Lumi opens her eyes and leans forward again.
"We'll meet weekly," Lumi says. "Same time. Same room. Whatever you tell me stays in this room — it doesn't go in the evaluation file unless I determine there's an immediate safety concern. That boundary is real. You can test it."
"Everyone says that."
"I know. Test it anyway."
She walks me to the door. Sven is right outside.
Lumi touches my arm as I step out. Light. Brief. Her fingers on my forearm, just above my left wrist.
The heat jumps.
Not a pulse. Not the slow flare I've been getting. A surge — sharp, specific, running from the point where her fingers touch my skin up through my forearm and into my shoulder. My breath hitches. I pull my arm back. Not a flinch. Faster than a flinch. Reflex.
Lumi's hand drops. Her face doesn't change. But her eyes do — something in them solidifies. Certainty. She just confirmed something she suspected.
"The body always knows first," she says. Quiet. For me, not for Sven. "Whatever you're feeling — the heat, the pull — don't fight it. You can't win that fight, and trying will make it louder."
I stare at her.
She didn't ask me if I was feeling heat or pull. She told me I was. Like she already knew. Like she's seen it before.
"What is this?" My voice is low. Sven is three feet away and I don't want him to hear.
Lumi looks at me for a long moment. I can see the calculation — what to say, how much, how soon.
"Transition," she says. One word. Chosen carefully, placed precisely, and offered without explanation.
Sven's hand finds my arm. "Let's go."
I walk. Across the yard. Past the fence. Through the door. Down the hallway. Into my room. Bolt turns.
I sit on the bed.
I hold my left wrist in my right hand and look at it.
Skin. Veins. The faint blue lines running beneath the surface. The pulse point where the heat lives. Normal. It looks completely normal.
But it's not. Something is in there — under the skin, in the blood, in whatever runs deeper than blood — that responds to a man I've never spoken to.
Transition.