Chapter eight
Jessica
The last breakfast is the loudest one yet, and I hate that it's the last.
"It went too fast," Sophia is saying, for the third time, stabbing a piece of fruit. "That's illegal. Somebody should be arrested. A whole week? We need at least two."
"It's the mountains," Freya says. "Time moves differently up here."
"That's very poetic, and also I want my days back."
I'm only half in the conversation, because I'm busy being quietly, stupidly sad.
A week ago I got on a plane certain this was a free vacation I'd endure politely and then leave.
Now I'm sitting at a scarred wooden table with five people I'd genuinely miss, in a castle I've fallen in love with, seriously — actually seriously — thinking I could do this. That I could make it at this academy.
I catch Torres watching me over his coffee, that quick read of his, and he tips his head like you good? and I make a face like shut up and he grins into his cup.
Jon comes in near the end, and something's different about him this morning — not bad, just…
weightier. He waits for us to finish, then says, "Before the van takes you down to the main academy this afternoon, there's one last session.
The most important one of the week, actually.
" A pause. "Finish your coffee. Meet me in the east meeting room in twenty minutes. "
"Ominous," Renzo says cheerfully.
Jon doesn't smile the way he usually does. "A little," he admits, and leaves.
Jon's already there when we file in, and he's not leaning against anything this time. He's standing in the open space in the middle of the room, hands loose at his sides, and there's a stillness to him that puts a small, animal part of my brain quietly on alert.
We sit. He looks at us for a long moment, and then he answers the question we've been asking since the very first cream envelope.
"You've all wanted to know why you," he says. "Why the six of you. Today I'm going to tell you, and then I'm going to prove it, and I need you to try — as hard as you can — to stay in your seats while I do."
That lands strangely. Nobody laughs.
"It starts with a blood test," Jon says.
"Every one of you had one, in the last few months.
Some of you at a hospital, some at a clinic, one of you—" a glance at me "—after a fall on a mountain.
" My stomach does a slow, cold turn. The routine blood draw.
The nurse. Barely takes a second. "Those samples run through a panel most people never think about.
And every one of you came back carrying an extremely rare genetic marker. "
For a second nobody says anything. Then my brain, which likes problems it can solve, latches onto the obvious one.
"So it's medical," I say. "This is a research thing. You found some marker and you're studying us."
"Are we dying?" Sophia blurts, and her voice cracks on it, and suddenly it's not funny at all. "Like — is that what this is? Six people with the same rare thing, flown to a mountain to be told gently — are we dying?"
"No," Jon says, and he says it fast and firm, no hesitation, and I watch the relief hit her like a wave. "No. You're not sick. None of you is sick. I promise you that."
Renzo raises a hand, visibly reaching for the joke, because that's how Renzo survives things. "Do we get superpowers?"
A couple of us laugh, on reflex, grateful for it.
Jon doesn't. "No," he says quietly.
And the laugh dies in the room, because that flat, serious no is somehow more unnerving than a yes would have been.
I lean forward. "Then what does it mean? You keep saying rare, different, important. What is the marker actually for?"
Jon looks at me gently. "It means each of you is different," he says, "in a way you don't have any framework to understand yet.
And there's no sentence I can say that will make the next part any easier.
" He slowly shrugs out of his jacket, folds it over the back of a chair.
"I could spend the next hour explaining. "
He steps back into the open center of the room.
"Or I could show you." He looks around at all of us, and his voice drops. "I need you to stay where you are. This isn't going to hurt you. I am not going to hurt you. “Whatever you feel in that moment, remember—it’s instinct. And it’s going to tell you to run. Don’t.”
"Jon," I start, "what are you—"
And then he shifts.
There's no warning, no dramatic pose. One second he's a man standing in the light, and the next his spine bows, wrong, too far, and a sound comes out of him that isn't pain and isn't quite anything human either.
His hands hit the floor and they aren't hands by the time they land.
There's a rush, and I hear someone screaming and distantly understand it isn't me because I can't make a single sound at all.
It takes seconds. It feels like it takes the rest of my life.
And then there's a wolf standing in the east meeting room of Lufgard Castle.
An enormous one. Bigger than any dog, than any wolf I've seen in any documentary, chest deep, shoulders high, dark fur — and its eyes are Jon's eyes, that same warm patient brown, watching us out of an animal's face, and that is the part that breaks me because I know those eyes.
It doesn't move. It doesn't growl. It just stands there, and waits.
My brain, my poor rational brain, gets to work immediately, because it has to, because the alternative is unthinkable.
Animatronics. That's the first one. It's a machine, a puppet, an incredibly good one, there's a man in a — no. No, I watched the man become it. There was no seam, no swap, I never looked away.
A hallucination. Something in the coffee, in the mountain air, mass suggestion, I'm not well, I hit my head on that trail two weeks ago and I've been in a coma this whole time dreaming a castle — but Sophia is sobbing beside me and I can feel her shaking against my arm.
A projection. A trick of light, a screen, a — it just turned its head. It just turned its massive head and its ears moved and I felt the air stir and the floorboards took its weight with a creak I heard in my teeth.
Every explanation I reach for crumbles the second I hold it up to the thing standing just a few feet away from me, breathing, real, watching.
I run out of explanations.
The room comes apart.
Sophia has backed all the way into her chair and then some, knees up, crying openly now, the loud helpless kind.
Declan is on his feet — I didn't see him stand — and he's put himself squarely between the wolf and the rest of us, huge and pale and absolutely unarmed, doing it anyway, on pure instinct.
Renzo has scrambled backward, tripped over his own chair, and gone down hard, and he's still going, crab-crawling toward the wall, saying "Nope," over and over, "nope, nope, nope," like the word is a door he can close.
Freya hasn't moved a muscle. She's frozen, rigid, eyes locked on the wolf, unable to look away or look toward, caught.
And I'm just staring. Rooted. My lungs have forgotten the job. My pulse is slamming so hard I can feel it in my throat, my hands, the backs of my knees. Every part of me is screaming the thing Jon told me it would — run, run, run — and I can't make my body do anything at all.
Only one person in the room isn't looking at the wolf.
Torres.
He's still in his seat, half-turned, and he's watching us.
Sweeping the room, face to face, checking each of us the way he checked the trail corners all week — Sophia, Renzo on the floor, Freya frozen, Declan standing guard, me.
He's not afraid of the wolf. Not even a little.
He's afraid for us, and I don't understand how I can see that so clearly when I can barely see straight, but I can.
The wolf lowers its head, slow and deliberate, a gesture so unmistakably gentle it makes no sense on something that size — and its shape blurs again, and Jon is crouched on the floor, human, breathing hard, with hands that are just hands again.
He stands, pulls on his jackets and looks at us. Nobody says a word. Nobody can.
Then everyone says every word at once.
It erupts — Sophia and Renzo and me and even Declan all talking, over each other, none of it landing, a wall of what and how and that's not possible and do it again and don't you dare do it again.
I'm trying to get a sentence out and I can't, my mouth keeps starting and stalling, my whole vocabulary reduced to fragments.
Under all of it, low and even, Torres says: "Take a breath."
Nobody listens. The noise doesn't even dip.
He doesn't look surprised. He nods once, to himself, like that was exactly what he expected, and lets us burn through it.
It's Renzo, still half on the floor, who finally gets a full sentence out, high and cracking: "You're — you're telling us we're all going to turn into that?"
Jon opens his mouth to answer.
And Torres, quiet, beats him to it. "Not today."
Everyone stops. Every head turns to him.
He’s leaned forward now, elbows on his knees, and he looks around at all of us, his expression steady. "I know it feels like your whole life just exploded," he says.
"It did," I hear myself say, wrecked.
"It did," he agrees, easy, no argument. "But you're still you. Right now, this second, you're exactly who you were ten minutes ago. That doesn't change today. I promise."
I turn to him fully, and the question comes out of me raw: "How are you so calm?"
He gives me a small, crooked smile. "Because I already had my freak-out."
And that — that lands in the room like a hand on a shoulder. I feel the collective flinch of understanding go through all six of us at once.
Sophia scrubs at her face, hiccuping. "You mean — you knew? This whole time? You knew and you just — did the ropes course with us?"
"Yep." Torres shrugs. "You all looked about how I looked, well except I cried more."
Sophia lets out a wet, startled laugh despite herself. "Really?"