The back of my neck prickles.
Arden pulls a dead leaf from the plant and crushes it between her fingers. “That program had subjects who stopped having names even in places where names were useful. Staff used numbers for them because the doctor did. If your male is thirty-series and permanently marked, he may have been Fell’s.”
My male.
The words land low in my body before my mind catches up.
I should correct her. The answer is right there, simple and clean.
My patient.
I even draw the breath to say it.
But Arden is watching the healers’ wing, not me, and the correction sticks behind my teeth.
My patient. My case. The wolf in the locked room.
None of it comes out.
“What were they studying?” I ask instead.
“I told you what I know.” There is a line in her voice now.
I’m pushing too hard. “Thank you,” I say.
She gives a short nod, already reaching for the next plant.
I turn to leave.
“Sable.”
I stop.
Arden is still kneeling in the dirt, hands braced on her thighs. “If he was Fell’s, don’t assume he knows what he is.”
I look toward the healers’ wing.
The sun has moved higher. The windows no longer shine. They look dark from this angle.
“What does that mean?”
“It means some of them were for research.” Arden’s voice is level. “And some of them were weapons.”
The feverfew trembles under the wind.
“Which was he?”
“I don’t know.”
She looks at the wing again.
“But if they tattooed the number where everyone could see it, they wanted the staff to remember what he was before they remembered he was a man.”
I carry that with me through the rest of the morning.
Fell. Thirty-series. Frequency work. The way staff looked at doors before they spoke.
Not a name. A trail.
