Every time I reach for words, he hears exposure. Every time I try to think past the next threat, he reads the space as danger. The man surfaces, and the wolf braces for the blow that always came after.
But not here.
No straps. No sealed air. No hands forcing me down.
Only gray dawn, rain tapping through the broken window, and her breathing against my chest.
The wolf listens to the mountain.
The man gets to open his eyes.
I ease my arm from around her. Slowly. She stirs but doesn’t wake. Her hand tightens on my knuckles for a second, then releases. I slide sideways until her head rests against the wall instead of my chest, and I stand.
My legs hold. The ache is there, but it’s just an ache, not the buckle-and-fall from last night. I cross the small room to the window.
The world is out there.
I stop breathing.
Trees. Everywhere. Tall pines climbing the slope above the cabin, their branches dark and heavy with rain. A rock face to the north, streaked with water. The slope drops away to the east, and through the trees I can see…sky. Not a ceiling. Not fluorescent panels. Not the metal roof of a transport vehicle. Sky. Gray and low with cloud, and the edges of it go on forever. The wideness of it hits me so hard that my hand braces against the window frame.
How long has it been since I saw the sky?
Years. It’s been years.
My throat closes. I grip the frame until my fingers hurt and I breathe through it—one breath, two, three—and I watch theclouds move. They’re shifting slowly. West to east. The wind carries the smell of wet pine and stone and cold earth, and all of it is real. Not pumped through vents. Not filtered through glass. Real air, and real trees, and a sky that doesn’t end at the walls of a room.
A bird calls from somewhere beyond the broken window, two notes close together, repeated from a branch I can’t see.
My head tilts before I mean it to. Not tracking for threat. Something other than the wolf turns toward the sound, and when the bird calls again, I know the interval before I know why I know it.
A minor third. Descending.
The words surface whole, carrying other things with them: the distance between notes, the tension inside a phrase, the ache of a melody leaning toward resolution. I grip the window frame harder, rain-damp wood rough beneath my fingers.
Dr. Fell carved lines into my skin. She strapped me to a table and forced sound out of my chest until it became data in her file, but she didn’t take this.
The bird sings again.
I shape my mouth around the interval and whistle it back.
The sound comes out thin. Rusted. Almost nothing.
But it is mine.
A fragment of something I don’t remember learning. Nothing like the force Dr. Fell dragged out of me, nothing that bends the air or rattles the walls. Just breath shaped into music.
Mine.
“Hey.”
Her voice. Behind me. Sleep-rough and cautious.
I stop whistling and turn, almost feeling guilty that she caught me echoing a bird.
She’s sitting against the wall where I left her. She’s retrieved her shirt—now dry—and wrapped it around her shoulders. Herhair is tangled. Her legs are bare below the jacket’s hem—long, pale in the silvery light, drawn up with her arms looped around her knees.
I’ve been beside her all night. I’ve felt her breathing against my chest for hours. But I was looking at the dark, not at her.
