Chapter 7
Petra
I build the program.
I move out of my bunk in the suite annex and into the cabin two doors down from Damon's.
The cabin is small — kitchen, bath, bedroom, one main room — but the windows face east, and the morning light comes through the trees, and there is a porch where I can sit with coffee and watch the compound come awake.
The cabin was unoccupied; Conrad had been keeping it for prospects who needed a temporary place, and he gives it to me with a brief, formal handshake at the lodge porch on a Tuesday morning, no fanfare, no welcome speech, just this is yours now, which is, I am learning, how Conrad does most things.
I unpack my van.
Wren drives me to Roanoke to pick it up.
The drive is six hours round trip and Wren talks more this time — he has been promoted from prospect to patched member since I last saw him, and his patch is fresh enough that he is still touching it absentmindedly as he drives — and he asks me about the field medicine program and what kind of trainees I am going to take.
I tell him. He volunteers. I tell him to send me a written request on Tuesday and we will see. He sends me one on Monday night.
My van comes back to Bone Hollow on a Wednesday afternoon, and I park it behind the cabin, and I take eleven years of equipment out of it and into a workshop space at the back of the clinic that Jo has cleared for me.
The eleven years of equipment looks smaller in the workshop than it did in the van.
I do not know what to do with that information except that I am not the woman who fits in that van anymore, and I am not the woman who fit in that van for a long time before today, and I have only just noticed.
I build out the trauma wing.
Jo's clinic is small but well-funded. The Sinners have been running the Hollow Pit profitably for fifteen years, and they put a substantial fraction of the profits back into the compound's infrastructure, and the clinic is one of the line items. I get a four-bed acute care wing, a dedicated trauma bay, a small operating theater that Jo and I will share, and a training room with mannequins and a simulator setup that Hex builds for me from scratch in the first two weeks.
Hex.
I meet Hex on day four.
He is a Bone Hollow Sinner, patched, late thirties, scrawny, with a wolf I have not seen because Hex is — by his own description, in the first conversation we have — not really the shifting type.
He is the technical operator. He runs the surveillance, the comms, the books in coordination with Reaper, and apparently also the analysis pipeline through which the prediction system is going to be built.
He shakes my hand in the workshop on a Thursday and says, "I have been waiting to meet you for eight years, Petra Kazan.
I read your case notes in 2017 and told everyone who would listen that the underground needed you, and the underground did not listen because the underground is run by alphas who do not enjoy taking advice from techs. "
"I appreciate the recommendation."
"I would like to show you what I have built for your analysis."
He shows me what he has built.
It is — I do not have words. It is a custom-coded analysis pipeline that takes my eleven years of injury notes, the pre-fight cortisol panels, the shift-cycle data I have been tracking informally for six years, and runs them through a machine-learning model that is, by Hex's calculations, accurate to within eighty-one percent on feral-risk prediction.
He has been building it for two years. He has been building it for me, before he knew I would ever be here.
"Why," I say.
"Because the system needed to exist," he says. "I built it on the assumption that you would eventually arrive."
"Hex."
"Yes."
"You are a strange man."
"Yes."
"I like you."
"I like you too, Petra Kazan. Now sit down. I am going to show you how the model handles edge cases."
I sit down. He shows me. We work for four hours.
I have not had a colleague like Hex in eleven years.
I have had partners — cornermen, runners, the occasional surgeon I respected — but I have not had a peer.
Hex is a peer. He thinks the way I think.
He is interested in the things I am interested in.
He is funny in the dry, sideways way that I am funny.
He brings me coffee without asking what I take in it because he has — and I am realizing the Sinners do this systematically — read my dossier in advance and knows that I take it black.
I build the prediction system with Hex.
I build the training program with Jo.
I build a life at Bone Hollow with Damon.
Damon and I do not move in together. We talked about it on the second morning after I said yes to the job, and we both agreed that we would do this slow — that I would keep my cabin and he would keep his and we would walk back and forth across the compound at our own pace, and we would not collapse into each other in the way that people collapse when they are both starving for the thing they have not let themselves have.
We see each other every day. We eat dinner together most nights, sometimes in his cabin, sometimes in mine, sometimes in the lodge with whoever is around.
We sleep in the same bed most nights — usually his, because his is bigger and his is closer to the lodge — and we do not sleep together every night, because we are both adults with work to do and bodies that get tired, and we are not performing.
I meet the women of Bone Hollow.
Jo I already know. Jo is my colleague. Jo is also, increasingly, my friend, and on Thursdays we walk the eastern ridge together and talk about cases and lives and the men we have chosen, and Jo's husband — a patched Sinner named Cole — is, she tells me, the second alpha she has loved and the first one who has made her think about staying, and I listen to her say it and recognize my own life in the shape of hers.
Lena I meet on day six. Lena is married to Reaper.
Lena is — she is a former dancer, she has been on the compound for eight years, she runs the kitchens and a herd of small children that are not all hers but who all gravitate to her, and she brings me a pie on my first Sunday because Reaper said you would not be expecting it, which is exactly why you should have it.
Lena and I are not the same person. We do not have to be.
She is kind to me without being saccharine, and she is interested in my work without being intrusive about it, and she invites me to Sunday dinner without making the invitation a test.
Amara I meet on day ten. Amara is — Amara is married to a Sinner named Luca who is, she tells me, "the kindest dangerous man I will ever know," and she is a librarian who has built the compound's reference library out of a converted feed shed, and she gives me a tour on a Monday and shows me the medical section she has been quietly building for me since Jo told her I was coming.
The medical section has books I have wanted for years and could not afford on a circuit medic's pay.
I cry in the library.
Amara pretends she does not notice.
I respect her deeply for that.
— —
The training program opens for its first cohort on a Tuesday in late September.
I have six trainees. Wren is one of them.
Two other patched members. Two prospects.
One non-MC compound member who is, by way of background, a former combat medic in the Army Rangers whose name is Toby and who hits the ground running on day one and is going to be, by my assessment, my second-in-command within a year.
I teach.
I have not taught before, formally. I have trained cornermen on the road — don't drop the flashlight — but I have not built a curriculum and walked a cohort through it.
I find that I am good at it. I find that the things I know — the things I have learned through eleven years of doing field medicine in vans and warehouses and basements — translate into a structured program more cleanly than I expected.
Hex's simulator helps. Jo's surgical instruction helps.
But the bulk of the curriculum is mine, and the trainees pick it up faster than I imagined they would, because they are motivated and intelligent and they have all seen, in one way or another, a brother bleed out from something that could have been treated.
I tell the trainees, on day one, "I have lost four fighters in eleven years on the circuit.
The four names are Henry, Brick, Jameson, and Theo.
I carry them with me. I will tell you about each of them in the next six weeks, and I will tell you, in detail, what I did wrong and what was beyond my control and what I would do differently.
The point of this program is for you to learn from my errors so that you do not have to make your own.
I want you to be better than I am. By the time you graduate, you should be. "
Toby raises his hand.
"Yes."
"Doc — Petra — that is the best opening of any course I have ever taken. Please continue."
The cohort laughs. Wren laughs. I almost laugh. The class proceeds.
— —
The dominance challenge arrives on a Friday in mid-October.
It comes by hand — a formal scroll, of all things, sealed with wax, carried by a patched member of a North Carolina pack called the Asheville Iron — and Conrad receives it on the lodge porch in front of everyone, because that is the protocol for a formal challenge and the protocol is observed even in the underground.
I am not on the porch when the scroll arrives, but I hear about it within an hour because the compound's grapevine is excellent and Jo finds me in the workshop and tells me to come to the lodge for the meeting that Conrad has just called.