Chapter 4
Him
White light. That’s the first thing. Always the first thing. White light bleeding through closed eyelids, the kind that doesn’t cast shadows because there’s nowhere for shadows to go.
I’m on the table. Steel beneath my spine, cold enough to burn. Restraints across my chest, my wrists, my ankles; something synthetic that doesn’t give when I pull. I always pull.
The hum starts next. Low. Equipment warming up somewhere to my left, outside my field of vision.
Footsteps. Deliberate. In no hurry.
“Good morning, 3-0-6-7-0.”
Dr. Fell’s voice. The voice that explains what’s coming before she does it, as if narration makes it clean.
I don’t answer. I never answer. I stopped speaking after the first few months because it never made a difference. Cursing, pleading, screaming…it’s just background noise in this place where screams ring out daily.
Her fingers find my wrist. Two fingers. Counting.
The same position as the other woman’s, but slower.
Her thumb traces the vein before she settles into the count.
She does this every time—the extra touch, the unnecessary drag of skin on skin.
Her hand is cool and steady, and there’s nothing clinical about the way it lingers. It turns my stomach.
“Your vitals are stable. Heart rate elevated, but that’s expected.” The pen scratches. “We’ll proceed with today’s session.”
She moves to my left side. I feel her adjusting something on the equipment—a dial turning, a switch clicking into position.
Then her fingers at my temple, placing the electrode.
She doesn’t need to touch my hair to do this, but she does anyway, pushing it back, her thumb following the line of my jaw, resting there a beat too long before she pulls back.
My skin crawls where she touched it. My wolf snarls from somewhere the restraints can’t reach.
She ignores the snarl. She always ignores the snarl. I think it’s part of what she likes. Knowing that I’m at her mercy and there’s nothing I can do about it.
“Subject 3-0-6-7-=0. Frequency extraction, day eighty-seven. Neural mapping concurrent. Administering stimulus in three…two…”
The sound hits first.
A tone. One note forced into my skull from the equipment overhead. It gets into my teeth, my ribs, the plates of my skull. My body answers before I can stop it.
That’s what they want.
Not the tone. What the tone drags out of me.
The hum tears up from somewhere below my sternum, pulled hard and wrong, like something hooked through the bone. It pushes against the restraints. Against the runes. Against every carved barrier they put in my skin to keep it contained.
My wolf claws for the shift.
The straps hold.
The runes flare white-hot.
The hum keeps building.
“Amplitude confirmed,” Dr. Fell says. “Marking threshold. Neural response is—”
A string goes sharp.
Not here.
Not in the white room.
A violin. A young man’s elbow locked too high, bow biting down too hard on the A string.
Relax your right arm. Feel the weight of the bow. Don’t grip it.
He nods. Draws the bow across the A string.
The sound fills the room, warm, imperfect, alive.
The sound rings off the plaster ceiling.
His shoes are untied. There’s a pencil behind his ear that he’s forgotten about.
On the piano behind him are two paper coffee cups.
Mine and his, because he always shows up early and brings one without asking how I take it.
Black. I like my coffee black. He figured that out on his own.
Better. Now from the top. Watch your intonation on the third measure.
The bow moves. The melody starts to build—
Wrong.
The sound goes flat, the light goes white, and the windows dissolve into fluorescent panels.
The young man’s face is gone. The coffee cups are gone.
The afternoon sun is gone, and the loss of it hits somewhere below my ribs, physical, a thing being torn out of my hands while my fingers are still closing.
God. Not here. Not again.
Dr. Fell is standing where the music stand was.
She’s moved closer during the extraction.
Not to the equipment, to me. My wolf recoils, but the restraints make it pointless.
Her clipboard is at her side. She’s watching my face, and the expression on hers isn’t the flat clinical read I see from the other staff.
There’s something underneath it. Something that leans forward.
She marks something on her clipboard without looking down at it. Her eyes stay on mine.
“Subject 3-0-6-7-0, prepare for secondary stimulus.”
I clench my jaw.
“That’s not his name.”
The words slice through the hum. A woman’s voice. Not Dr. Fell’s.
Sable.
I know that voice. I’ve heard it in the dark, through the fog of whatever they push into my veins, when everything else goes away, and there’s nothing left but the slow, drugged breathing and the locked door and her.
“That’s not your name.”
I try to swivel my head. To see what’s around me.
Where the fuck am I?
The tone starts again. Louder. I hear her hand on the dial; a click, another click, each one driving the frequency higher. The thing in my chest surges in response—not willing, not chosen, ripped upward by the frequency. It presses into the gaps between my ribs, the vertebrae, the base of my skull.
Fuck!
The pain is blinding. My wolf throws himself against the inside of my chest as my back bows.
The sound has no outlet. It turns inward, clawing, shredding, and I can feel the runes heating along my forearms, my ribs, my throat.
All at once. Carved fire tracing the symbols they burned into my skin, and my wolf howls, but the sound can’t get past my locked jaw, my lungs won’t fill, and—
Hands.
My own. Without restraints. Moving freely through air that smells like rosin dust and wood varnish and the coffee someone left on the piano. The room has changed again. Bright with sunshine, not the flickering fluorescents that blind and burn.
A small group watches my right hand, waiting for the cue. Eight faces. The cellist in the front row has her hair falling into her eyes again. The second violinist keeps glancing at the door because his bus leaves at four-fifteen and he’s going to miss it if I run long.
Feel the pulse. Don’t just count it. Let your body carry the tempo.
They breathe together. The music begins.
And for one measure—one—the sound is mine. Not dragged. Not forced. Not extracted through electrodes and amplified until it breaks things. Just music. Eight instruments breathing together because my hands told them when, and the vibration in my chest is warm and right and belongs to me.
Glass breaking somewhere. The room folds. The ensemble scatters into white light, and Dr. Fell’s voice, still calm: “Subject 3-0-6-7-0 remains non-compliant. Increase dosage. Resume testing at oh-six-hundred.”
The needle slides in.
Always the fucking needle.
The drug spreads thick and slow, shutting down one system at a time. The tone fades. The light dims. My wolf goes quiet, muffled, drowned under the weight of it.
But her voice stays.
“That’s not your name.”
Sable. The woman who comes into my room when the world is dark and locked and made of nothing. Who talks to me while her hands change bandages. Who tells me things I can’t hold onto: names, outcomes, the fact that I didn’t break anyone, the fact that someone is fine.
I don’t know my name.
3-0-6-7-0.
The number sits in the dark, waiting. Patient. It doesn’t need me to accept it. It just needs me to stop fighting.
My wolf lifts his head.
Bares his teeth.
Somewhere under the drugs, my fingers move against the blanket.
First finger. Second. Third.
Not claws. Not fists.
A count-in.
One, two, three—
The rest is gone. The room, the students, the coffee on the piano, the piece we were playing. All of it slips away before I can catch it.
But my hand remembers what it should do before the music begins.
I don’t know my name.
But I know I used to make music.