6. Chapter 6
Chapter six
J essica
"Shift."
I stand there.
"Shift," Voss says again.
The training ground is cold and half in shadow and I've been standing on this patch of it for eleven minutes, which I know because there's a clock on the equipment shed.
I close my eyes and reach for whatever happened in that clearing — reach hard, like there's a handle somewhere behind my ribs that I just have to grip properly.
Nothing.
Not no response. That would be last year, when there was nothing in there at all, when I could scream at my own body for an hour and it was like shouting into an empty house.
This is different. It's in there. I know it is — there's a weight low in my chest that wasn't there before April, a pressure like a held breath.
And I can't reach it.
"I'm doing it," I say.
"You are standing," Voss says.
"I'm doing it internally."
"Yes." He makes a note on the board he carries, which I have come to hate. "Again."
Twenty feet away, a group of third-years is doing shift drills, and one of them goes human to wolf and back four times in the space of a few minutes.
Human. Wolf. Human. Like changing shoes.
I hate her a little bit. She seems lovely. I hate her a little bit anyway.
"Professor Voss."
"Miss Miller."
"Can I ask why we're doing this?"
"Because you have one recorded shift and no ability to reproduce it."
"Right, but why does that matter—" I catch the look and rephrase. "I'm not being difficult. I'm asking what the actual problem is. Everyone's seen it. Nobody thinks I made it up."
Voss lowers the board.
"If you can only shift when you believe you're about to die," he says, "that isn't control."
"I had excellent control with the bear."
"You killed it."
"Exactly."
"That is not the definition of control."
Somewhere behind me the third-years have started laughing at something.
"And there's a second reason," Voss says, "which is that whatever you become is considerably larger and stronger than what any of them become. That doesn't make control less important. It makes it the only thing that matters." He picks the board back up. "Again."
The next forty minutes are a tour of everything that doesn't work.
We try calm first. Breathing. Eyes shut. Voss talking me through the physical memory in that flat instructional voice — the temperature change, the pressure at the base of the skull, all of the things.
Nothing happens.
Being told to relax is one of the least relaxing things a human being can experience.
We try movement. He runs me until my lungs burn, until my body has stopped consulting my brain about anything, and then says "shift" mid-sprint, and I keep sprinting, being a person.
We try pressure. He puts on pads and comes at me hard — properly hard, the way he did in first-year combat when he wanted to see what I'd do — and the months on Luke's mat come up out of my arms and I hold for four exchanges before he puts me on the ground.
I get up.
Still a person.
My body knows I'm safe. That's the infuriating part. Some deep animal committee has convened, assessed Professor Rurik Voss and a padded training ground, and voted unanimously that nothing here justifies the paperwork.
"Again," Voss says.
"That hasn't worked the last six times."
I stand in the middle of the training ground with my hands on my knees.
"I did this already," I say.
"Once."
"Do you—" I straighten up. "Do you understand that I spent an entire year with everyone in this place waiting for me to shift?
A year of Faris looking at me like a clerical error.
A year of being the experiment. And I finally did it, I finally did the thing, and it turns out that wasn't enough either, because now I have to do it on cue. "
Voss looks at me with absolutely no reaction whatsoever.
"Yes," he says.
God, I hate him.
I don't. But I do. And I still can't do it.
I'm the miraculous extinct direwolf who can't become a direwolf.
Over on the other side of the ground, someone's stance gets corrected.
I look up because the voice carried, and it's Soren — sleeves shoved up, standing with a student who's been struggling with something, and he isn't being encouraging about it. He says maybe nine words. The student adjusts. Soren nods once and moves on.
He's been out here the whole session. Voss has him assisting with the advanced practical work, which — fine. Obviously. Of course the academy hands the most controlled person on campus to the people learning control.
He's good at it. That's the annoying part because I am so terrible at it.
"You're waiting for it," Soren says.
I turn around. He's about ten feet away now.
"Thank you, Professor."
He doesn't react to that even slightly.
"That's why it isn't happening."
"Oh, excellent." I push my hair off my face. "He speaks direwolf."
"I don't speak direwolf." He comes closer. "I've watched you for forty minutes and you do the same thing every time. You stop. You close your eyes. You wait for something to arrive."
"Because it did arrive. In April. That's the only data I have."
"You're trying to make yourself shift."
"That is literally the assignment."
"It isn't what you were doing when it happened."
And that — okay. That stops me.
"You didn't decide to shift at that bear," Soren says. "You decided to fight it. The shift came after."
"I decided not to be eaten."
"Exactly."
I look at Voss. Voss is writing something on his board and pointedly not rescuing me.
"I can't recreate a rabid bear," I say.
"Then stop trying to," Soren says. "You keep making the wolf the objective. It wasn't the objective. It was how your body solved a problem." He shrugs, one shoulder, like he's just told me where the bathrooms are. "Give it a problem."
"That's not how—" I stop. "Is that how it works?"
"I don't know."
"Fantastic."
"Nobody knows. Nobody's had to know since the Fourth House fell." He glances at Voss. "It's a hypothesis."
"Test it," Voss says, without looking up.
Sparring with Soren is like sparring with a building.
He's bigger than me by a completely unreasonable margin, he's years further into his training, and there is not one wasted movement anywhere in him. I go at him and I get precisely nowhere, and then I'm on the mat looking at the sky.
I get up.
"You're dropping your left shoulder," he says.
"I'm trying to hit you."
"Badly."
I go at him harder.
He puts me down again.
"Still dropping it."
"I heard you the first time."
"You didn't."
We go again, and again, and it's about the fifth time down that I start noticing things I'd rather not notice.
He never uses more than he needs. Not once. He could end every exchange in half a second and instead he takes the exact amount necessary and no more — and when I go down, his hand is always somewhere I don't see it, taking the worst of it out of the fall.
He gives me the beat I need to get my feet back. He doesn't make it obvious. If you weren't down there you wouldn't see it.
And when I finally fix the shoulder — when I get through and actually catch him on the ribs, and he grunts — he doesn't say good .
He just steps in faster.
That's his version of it. That's what it means when Soren thinks you can do something. He makes it harder and says nothing.
I get an arm across and he turns it, and his hand closes around my wrist, and warmth goes straight up my arm — quick, bright, entirely unhelpful.
I yank free.
"Hands."
He looks at me.
"We're sparring," he says.
Right. Yes. Obviously.
We go again.
Ander's on the edge of the ground.
I notice him somewhere around the eighth time I hit the mat, standing over by the equipment shed with a bag over his shoulder like a man who finished his own session twenty minutes ago and has not left.
Of course he is. The whole campus wants to see whether the extinct wolf performs on command; why should the Great House resident miss out.
Then I go down again, and when I look up, he isn't watching me.
He's watching Soren.
I don't know what to do with that, so I file it with the other things I don't have time for and get up.
"You're thinking," Soren says.
"I'm fighting."
"You're thinking about fighting." He circles. "You did the same thing with Voss. You stand there and you inventory yourself. Is it happening? Is that heat? Was that something?" He comes in and I block it and he was never committed to it anyway. "You're asking permission."
"From who?"
"I have no idea," Soren says. "That's the problem."
And it feels like he punched me.
Because they're all doing it. Wren in the Council chamber. Faris in a classroom. Falken with a housing form. Everybody deciding what I am while I wait for somebody to hand me the answer.
I'm doing it out here too. Standing on a training ground with my eyes shut, politely requesting a wolf.
"Maybe the bear was better motivation," Soren says.
I look at him.
"Fuck you."
"There," he says.
"There what—"
He comes at me.
And I don't think about my shoulder or my stance or whether anything is happening in my chest, because I am no longer available for that; I am entirely occupied with the fact that I would like, very sincerely, to put Evren Soren on the ground.
I get inside his reach. I get a hand on his collar. He turns it, because of course he does, and I go back and my heel hits the edge of the mat and I'm going down with all of Soren coming down on me —
— and it's there.
Heat comes up under my skin like someone opened a door.
The base of my skull goes tight. The whole world jumps a step closer and I can suddenly smell the cut grass at the far fence, the oil on the equipment rack, the sweat on the man above me, all of it at once, layered and enormous, and it is exactly what happened in the clearing, precisely and unmistakably that —
I reach for it.
And it's gone.
The world drops back to its usual size. My skin is only my skin. I'm lying on a mat in the cold with my hair stuck to my face, being a person.
"Fuck."
Soren is off me and back on his heels. He's not saying anything. He's watching me with an expression I can't read at all.