The fire crackles. A log shifts, sending sparks upward. The floral scent is stronger now. It’s in the smoke. In the stone. In the warmth against my skin.
My eyes narrow on her, and my lip curls away from my teeth.
She ignores it.
“That’s your magic,…and you never even knew it.” She chuckles. “Ironic, isn’t it? That you were drawn to a world that molded your power. Not the way I can, though.”
My snarl is audible now.
She flicks a hand dismissively, then continues, “Your body can interrupt another shifter’s transformation,” she says, and there it is: the teaching voice. The one I heard through intercoms, through observation glass, through long afternoons when she sat beside the table and explained my own biology to me while the extraction ran.
“It travels through bone, air, concrete, steel, if the amplitude is sufficient. Wiring in a wall. A lock mechanism. A ward structure. A nervous system.” She pauses, head tilting slightly. “A heart, theoretically. With enough focus, you could find the rhythm of cardiac muscle and push it out of time.”
Her eyes brighten.
“I never tested that. I should have.”
My skin is crawling. The fire is still warm, but the cave walls have gone cold behind me. The stone that was smooth against my back has flattened into something harder, cleaner, too familiar.
“This is where you brought her,” she says.
She looks at the fire. At the walls. At the place where Sable sat, where the light moved across her face.
“This is where you decided you belonged to someone else.”
Her hand reaches across the space between us. Firelight catches her fingers: clean, precise, nails trimmed short. She touches my side through the shirt, and my body knows the place before my mind does.
The scar along my ribs wakes under her fingertips.
“I remember making this,” she says. Her fingers trace the line through the fabric, slow as the blade was slow. “Do you?”
The cave gives me the memory whether I want it or not.
The lamp tilted for better light. Her gloved hand. The scalpel from her desk drawer, not the surgical kit. Personal. She placed the tip against my ribcage the way you’d place a pen against paper. Found her starting point. Pressed.
“I’m going to mark the frequency line,” she’d said. Same voice she’s using now. Same calm instruction. “The sound maps along this arc, from the fourth rib to the eighth.”
The blade moved slowly, following the curve of my rib with the precision of someone tracing a line she had drawn a hundred times in her notes. My skin opened under the edge.
I screamed.
She adjusted her grip.
“I know,” she said, almost gently. “But you’ll want to know this later.”
The blade kept going. So did her voice. She explained what the frequencies did, where they originated, how the sound traveled, as if pain were just another diagram I needed help understanding.
There was no extraction running. No machine collecting data. No reason for the cut to keep lengthening beneath her hand.
Only the scalpel from her desk drawer.
Only her, writing a lesson into my skin.
In the cave, by the fire, her fingers follow the scar she made. Firelight lies across her hands. The same hands. The same slow, deliberate touch.
My skin burns under her fingertips, and the scar wakes as if the blade is still there.
The cave walls bleed into white panels. The fire dims to fluorescent. The rock beneath me hardens into steel.
