12 Tommy #2
“The resonance off her doesn’t read like a dormant.
A dormant carries a suppressor gene—it’s quiet, it’s structural, it’s part of how they’re built, and on the cloth it sits flat.
Sleeping. The chemical suppression the Order layers on top of that sits over it like a second blanket and the whole thing reads as one pattern.
Heavy, but unified. I’ve read a dozen of the women you brought out tonight from across the camp and they all read like that.
Suppressed dormants. Drugged, but recognizable. ”
The numb arm had come all the way back to life. I curled the fingers and uncurled them against Kaia’s spine, slow, just to be doing something with the thing rising in my chest.
“She doesn’t read like that,” Nadia said.
“Then what does she read like?”
“Active.” The word came through the canvas and sat in the middle of the tent.
“She reads like an active wolf. Live trigger. The kind that fires like normal, the kind your wolf fired on its own at fourteen or whenever you popped. There’s no suppressor gene under her at all.
The genetics are awake. They’ve always been awake. ”
“I sensed that already,” I said. “Is that a bad thing? You sound like that’s worse than what they’ve been doing to dormants.”
A breath. I asked my wolf if he knew anything about this and somehow, for once in the entirety of our life together, he had nothing to say.
That did not make me feel better.
“It’s different. I don’t know if it’s worse.
It’s an unknown. And there’s a binding on top I have never seen in my life.
Layer over layer over layer, going down twenty-some years, the oldest ones grown right into the cellular structure because they were laid on something that was already trying to move.
You don’t suppress a dormant like this. You can’t.
There’s nothing in a dormant to push this hard against.”
Her shadow finally moved. Maybe her hand coming up to her mouth and dropping again.
“They didn’t put her to sleep, Reed. She was never asleep. They caught a wolf that was already awake and they have been holding it underwater her entire life.”
The tent was very quiet.
I looked down at her. At the dark head against my throat, the soaked stiff shirt, the hand fisted in my hair, the long pale line of a neck that had a pulse going in it I’d been counting against my own all night.
Twenty-six years. I’d done that arithmetic at the booth without understanding what I was holding.
Active from birth.
Which meant there’d been a wolf in there the whole time—a real one, a full one, hers—pacing a cell the size of her own skin since before she had a word for cell or cage or self, while they stood over her and told her the pacing was a sickness, the pacing was the flaw, the pacing was the thing grace was supposed to lay down flat.
She’d told me, in the tunnel. The static. She’d called it the static. The flaw. The noise she’d held underwater with both hands.
The wolf came up the back of my throat with no joke in front of it for once, just a low grinding heat.
They built her. On purpose. From scratch.
A wolf raised to hate the wolf in her, a Steward to guard the door she was locked behind, and the whole monstrous machine of it stood up clear in my head all at once and I understood I was going to burn that compound to the dirt myself, with my hands, slowly.
“That’s not harvesting,” I said. My voice had gone somewhere low.
“That’s not a trafficking thing. That’s—Reed, they didn’t find her dormant and suppress her.
There was nothing dormant to find. They took an active wolf cub and they spent her entire life convincing her she was a disease.
So they’d have one. A wolf who chose them.
Except she never—” The word broke on me.
“She never chose anything. There was nobody home to choose. They made sure of it before she could talk.”
Through the canvas, I heard Reed Vásquez breathe out, slow, and when he spoke again the operational calm had gone thin.
“How many?” Not a question to me. To the air. To Nadia. To the morning. “If they did this to one. If they figured out how to cage an active wolf from the crib and stand her up in a gray uniform and call it a success—”
His shadow rose, came to its full height against the canvas, and there was a register in it I’d only ever heard him use over a fire that was about to kill somebody.
“How many of those Stewards? How many people in that building think they signed up and never had a choice at all?”
“I don’t know,” Nadia said. “Santos’ map shows us dormants. Not… this.”
“Then we find out.” Flat. Cold. Done. The hostility he’d walked up to this tent carrying—it goes in quarantine, no argument, half this crew’s going to lose their minds—had burned off entirely, and what stood there now was an alpha who’d just had a brand-new floor of hell pointed out to him and decided to go knock on it.
“Tommy. Listen. Even I can smell it—she’s in Heat, right?
With the dormants, it lasts three days. But—”
I looked down at her. I already knew. I’d known since the second my bare skin hit hers and the shift went back down its own throat.
“Nadia,” I said. “What’s going on with her? This isn’t how Brann, Santos, or Levi described things.”