“Yeah.” He glances at me. “You can’t?”
I can’t. My wolf perks up whenever I move close to him, but aside from that, I’m running on human hardware in wolf country, and it’s costing me.
“Lead the way,” I say.
He does. The gully drops steeply, and he picks a line through it that avoids the loose shale, angling toward the sound of running water I still can’t hear. I follow his feet, stepping where he steps. It’s a strange reversal; I’ve been guiding him for weeks. Now he’s guiding me, and he does it with the quiet competence of someone who once knew how to navigate.
We find the stream at the bottom. Narrow, cold, running fast over smooth rocks. We drink. The water is so cold it makes my teeth ache, but it’s clean, and my body takes it in like medicine.
He crouches on the bank beside me, cupping water in his hands. The morning light catches his face: the shape of his cheekbones, the stubble darkening along his jaw, his eyes clear and blue and tracking the tree line above us.
“How far do we need to go?” he asks.
“As far as we can before dark. The more distance we put between us and their last sweep point, the wider they have to cast.” I wipe my mouth. “They’ll use thermal imaging once theybring in the right equipment. We need to be underground or under enough rock to mask our signatures before that happens.”
He nods. Not the blank compliance of a patient following instructions. The nod of someone absorbing useful information and storing it.
“There are caves,” he says. “Higher up. I can feel the air…moving differently. Where rock opens into space.”
I look at him. “You can feel that?”
“The air has…” He pauses. Searches. “Pressure. Temperature. Where it moves through openings, it changes. Like sound through a room.”
I look back at the gully we just climbed down, then up toward the rocks. Water I couldn’t hear. A line through shale I wouldn’t have trusted. Now air moving through stone.
The Syndicate numbered him, drugged him, cut him open, and somehow missed the man who could stand barefoot on a mountain and read it better than I can.
“Then we head up,” I say. “Show me.”
We climb. The terrain steepens. The trees thin as we gain elevation, replaced by scrub pine and exposed rock. The wind picks up, and the temperature drops steadily. I can feel it in my fingers, in my ears, in the tightness of my lungs as the air gets sharper.
The helicopter comes back at midday.
I hear it before I see it, the rhythmic thump of rotors, distant but unmistakable. Rafael hears it first. His hand is on my arm before the sound reaches me, pulling me into the shadow of a rock overhang. We press flat against the stone and wait.
The helicopter sweeps east to west along the ridge below us. Slower than the morning pass. More methodical. They’re tightening the grid.
“They’ve narrowed the search area,” I say. “They know we went north.”
Rafael watches the helicopter through narrowed eyes. His jaw is set, but the shift isn’t threatening. He’s tracking it the way an operative assesses movement—distance, speed, pattern.
“How long before they come back?” he asks.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I admit. “I guess it depends on their fuel cycle. Maybe two hours. Maybe less.”
“Then we keep moving.”
We keep moving.
The afternoon is hard. The slope is relentless, the rock face increasingly exposed. My boots slip on wet stone. Rafael’s bare feet somehow find grip where mine can’t, the wolf abilities coming to the fore, but not as something dangerous. He’s moving better than I am now, and twice he turns back to offer his hand at a difficult traverse, his grip warm and sure as he pulls me up.
He’s talking more. Not fluently; sentences come in clusters, then silence, then another cluster. But the gaps are shorter, and the words are more precise. He tells me the rock composition is changing as we climb; more granite, less shale, which means caves are more likely. He tells me the temperature is going to drop hard before sunset.
Each time he speaks, I hear more of the man he was. The halting fragments are giving way to someone who observes, analyzes, communicates. Someone who was competent before the facility, and whose competence is surfacing now that the wolf is letting the man through.
“You were someone before,” I say. I don’t mean to say it out loud.
He glances at me. “Everyone was someone before.”
