6 Tommy
I have seen a lot of unsettling things in my life but a cult playing croquet might top the list.
They marched us out onto the lawn after lunch for something the schedule called Integration Recreation.
It was too pretty. That was the wrongness of it.
Trimmed grass rolled green down toward a koi pond that caught the sun in coins, white mallets laid out in a neat row, little pastel flags marking the wickets like a garden party in a dream you’d want to wake up from.
And around the whole bright postcard, every fifteen meters, a Steward or Warden stood with clasped hands, watching us be well.
Enforced leisure. Mandatory joy. All to help evaluate which of us hid a dormant wolf they could harvest. The chill of it sat right under the prettiness and made my teeth itch.
I stood there for a moment with the others milling around me and let the whole picture settle in.
If someone from the Conclave’s investigative arm had walked through that gate right now, they would have seen: natural light.
Fresh air. A koi pond. Humans experiencing recreational wellness programming in a supervised outdoor setting, which was exactly what the nonprofit filing described.
They would have written it up as compliant. They would have left.
This lawn, this pond, these mallets: they were the reason the operation had run for three hundred years without the roof coming down.
The mission file Reed had built called them the public face, but it was a flimsy two words for what I was standing in.
It wasn’t a face. It was a whole world, complete and sunlit, with its own logic and its own staff.
My pack was going to have to tear all of it down. Including the sincere belief these Stewards had in their supposed righteous cause.
So I did what my bloodline was built for. I made it real.
I clapped my hands and rounded up the nearest cluster of potential dormants like a camp counselor who’d had too much coffee.
“Okay, okay, here’s how it works. Teams. We need teams, because croquet without trash talk is just sad.
Eli, you’re with me, we’re the Mallet Militia, that’s non-negotiable. The name came to me in a dream.”
Eli grinned, his cheeks showing a hint of color. “Are we allowed to choose our own colors? I want the green mallet.”
I handed the mallet to him. “Green is yours, Militia. Miss Cora—you’re our coach. You don’t have to move. You just have to insult the other team with the authority of someone who’s seen it all.”
Cora cackled. An actual cackle, dry and delighted. “I’ll start by telling that girl over there that her posture looks like a wilted fern.”
“See? Coach is locked in.” I turned toward the others. “Lynn, you’re captaining the opposition. What’s the team name? You get to pick.”
Lynn shifted from foot to foot, looking down before she braved a smile. “The... the Wicked Wickets?” She said it shyly, then louder when the others laughed. “Yeah. The Wicked Wickets.”
“Devastating. I’m already shaking in my boots.” I swung my blue mallet in a lazy circle. “Alright, Wicked Wickets, who’s taking the first shot? Show us what you’ve got.”
And it worked. That’s the thing about people who’ve been frightened into silence—they’re not gone, they’re just waiting for one person to act like laughing is allowed.
Within ten minutes there was a game happening, a real one, with arguing and cheating and Cora heckling from her chair and Eli grinning like a kid.
The sound that came up off that lawn was so rare and so precious it caught in my chest—a bunch of caged people laughing in the sun, and not one Verdant Order operative sure whether to stop it.
I found Kaia at the edge of the grass.
She stood where the Wardens could see her, doing supervision, being supervised, and she was watching us potential dormants laugh.
The hunger for it showed in her eyes, wanting to let the smile up onto her face, wanting to step into the bright loud middle of the lawn and join in the garden party.
Instead she did her own version of rebellion, the small kind, the only kind she’d let herself have—a quiet sincere word here, a hand steadying a mallet there, always angled so the Wardens read compliance while the patients got real care.
Eli shoved his mallet into my hand. “You’re up, Tommy. The Wicked Wickets just put their ball right through the second loop. We’re losing.”
“I don’t actually know how to do this,” I announced, raising my voice so it carried across the grass. I held the mallet by the very end of the shaft, dangling it like a dead snake. “In California we just have feelings about lawns, we don’t engage with them physically.”
Kaia drifted closer, her tablet tucked under her arm. “Choke up on it.”
“Choke up on what?” I looked at her, playing dumb.
“The mallet.” Kaia stopped a couple of feet away, her voice flat but her gaze fixed on my hands. “Your hands are too low. And your stance is wrong.”
“Wrong how?” I made it dumber than it was, hoping to draw her in. “Like, philosophically wrong, or is my alignment off?”
“You’re leaning forward too much,” she said, taking a step onto the turf. “Keep your feet shoulder-width apart.”
“I’m a contractor, Steward. We’re built for leaning. It’s how we look busy when the supervisor walks by.”
“This isn’t a construction site. If you don’t adjust, you’ll hit the wicket instead of the ball.”
“Show me then. Since you’re supervising.”
Kaia let out a tiny breath that was almost a sigh. She stepped in.
She set her hand over mine on the grip.
Her chest came against my back—light, professional, a teacher fixing a student—and her breath brushed the side of my neck. The whole bright, loud lawn dropped away into a roaring kind of quiet.
Her scent hit me.
Not the lavender, not the antiseptic—under all of it, the real thing, the thing they couldn’t quite drown: warm and green and storm-rinsed, the smell of a hillside the morning after the rain finally breaks. Just a thread of it. Not enough to name, not enough to keep.
Enough to wreck me where I stood.
The wolf turned my head toward her throat.
What the hell was going on?
The pull to put my face against the pulse at the side of her neck was so sudden and total that I had to lock my spine to stop it, standing there rigid as a fencepost while every cell I owned tried to lean back into her.
One wrong move on this lawn and twenty Wardens would see a potential dormant who was very much not dormant.
That would end with me on a table and her dosed for standing too close. I held still. I held so still it hurt.
Kaia adjusted my fingers. “You’re gripping too hard.”
Not nearly hard enough, I didn’t say. The words sat in my mouth with about forty others I’d never get to use, and I swallowed every one of them, making my voice light.
“Story of my life, Steward.”
Kaia leaned closer. “Keep your elbows loose. And don’t look at me. Look at the target.”
“Hard to do when you’re standing right here.”
“I’m instructing you. Nothing more.”
She stepped back. The warmth of her peeled off my spine. The loss of it hit me like cold air through a breached door, and I thought, desperately, this is the potion thinning, this is withdrawal, this is biology. She’s human and I’m sex-starved, and I didn’t believe myself even a little.
I thought about Warden Miller, watching from wherever Miller watched.
A man who had used the word harvest in a sentence last night without flinching.
Who managed the intake of the people now laughing on this lawn.
Who would look at a Steward teaching a potential dormant to hold a mallet and see it as a problem.
And I was standing here cataloguing the scent of a woman’s hair while the machine that had eaten Wren, Nell, and Genny ran its afternoon schedule around us.
The whole thing—the koi pond, the pastel flags, Kaia’s hand on mine, the laughter—was so surreally domestic and so surreally wrong that for a second my brain refused to hold both pictures at once.
Who the hell was Steward Kaia Thorne, really?
That’s when I saw Eli step back and put his heel at the edge of the water.
It happened in the space between two breaths.
Miller had drifted down to the pond’s edge—I hadn’t clocked him arriving, too busy not pressing my face into a woman’s neck, sloppy, sloppy—and he said something to Eli, low, with that warm, poisoned father’s voice.
The kid flinched. Just a full-body recoil from a tone he’d learned to fear.
His foot went back, hitting the lip of the koi pond, slick stone, and his arms started to windmill.
Kaia moved to catch him.
I was already there.
That’s the problem with the wolf—he doesn’t wait for the vote.
He had my body across that grass before my brain finished reading the room, way too fast for any drugged-up potential dormant, and I got an arm around Kaia and hauled Eli upright by the back of his shirt with the other hand, and shoved him stumbling onto safe grass.
Then the Warden’s gaze came all the way around, and I understood I’d just moved like a predator in front of the whole congregation.
So I overcorrected.
I made it clumsy. I let my own redirect carry too far, let my heel hit the wet stone, threw my balance into a flail so total and so stupid it could only read as a man losing a fight with gravity—and I took her with me, because my arm was still around her, and we went into the pond together.
The cold hit like a fist. The pond was waist-deep and full of startled koi and green algae, and I came up sputtering, holding Kaia close.