Hands.
My own. Without restraints. Moving freely through air that smells like rosin dust and wood varnish and the coffee someoneleft 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.
Buthervoice 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.
Chapter 5
Sable
It’s just after first light when Greta finds me in the dispensary. I’m washing yesterday’s blood out of a stack of cloths. The water in the basin has gone pink, then rust, then brown. I tip it out, refill it from the kettle, and reach for the lye soap.
