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 onhers 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—
