“I mean…you think like someone who was trained. Not combat training. Something else.”
He’s quiet for a few steps. The wind pushes at us. A hawk circles high above the ridge, riding a thermal.
“I don’t remember enough,” he says. “Pieces. Music. A room with sunlight.” He looks at his hands. “I think I used to…lead people. Teach them. I remember standing in front of a group, and they were watching my hands.”
The image settles in my chest. A man standing in front of a group of people who watch and listen without fear.
“Rafael the teacher,” I say.
His eyes soften. “Maybe.”
He turns back to the path.
I step up behind him.
Then the ground drops out from under me.
There’s no warning. One second, my boot is on solid rock, the next the shale beneath it slides, and the whole shelf gives way, a section of trail no wider than my shoulders just peeling off the mountain. My foot goes through. My knee hits stone. My hands grab for anything and find nothing.
I scream as I go down.
“Sable!”
The drop isn’t vertical; it’s a steep angled chute between two rock faces, loose stone, scrub roots, and nothing to hold. I slide maybe ten feet before my hip catches a ledge and stops my fall. The impact drives the air out of my lungs. Below me, the chute drops another thirty feet into a narrow crevice choked with rock and shadow.
“Rafael!” I’m gasping. “Oh, God! I’m stuck!”
“Don’t move. The ledge you’re on… Can you see the edges?” His voice. Above me. Clear. Not the halting, word-by-word speech from before. The voice of a man in crisis, and crisis has stripped everything else away.
I look. The ledge is maybe two feet wide. The rock is fractured. My left leg is hanging over the drop, and the stone under my right hip is making sounds I don’t like.
“It’s cracking,” I say, fighting down panic.
“I know. Listen to me.” His face appears at the top of the chute. He’s on his stomach, one arm braced against the rock face, the other reaching down. His eyes are locked on mine, and they’re clear. Completely clear. The wolf is there—I can see it in the way his muscles bunch, the way his free hand grips the stone hard enough to leave marks—but the man is in front. Driving.
“I need you to reach up with your right hand. Slowly. Don’t shift your weight to the left.”
“I can’t reach you. You’re too far.”
“I’m coming down.”
His arm extends. His shoulder drops over the edge of the chute. The bones of his hand thicken…not a full shift, just his fingers lengthening, the grip widening. Controlled. Precise.
His hand closes around my wrist. The grip is iron.
“I’ve got you. Push up with your right leg. Now.”
I push. The ledge cracks under me—a sharp pop that sends a shower of stone into the dark below—and for one second I’m hanging by his hand over nothing.
I scream again. “Oh, my God! Rafael!” I glance down into the abyss below me and fight back another scream.
“It’s all right,” he says. “Just keep your eyes on me.”
I force my head up, locking my gaze on him. His eyes are calm and focused.
“I’ve got you,” he says. “I won’t let you go.”
And somehow, I believe him.
