“You saiddidn’t have.Past tense.”
Her jaw sets and then un-sets, like she’s caught and is deciding whether to be annoyed at the catch or just acknowledge it. “You’re more observant than you look,” she says.
“I look plenty observant.”
“You look like you’re not paying attention to anything.”
“That’s the strategy.” I lean on the stall across from her. “The best way to make people comfortable is to look like you’re half-distracted. Then they forget to censor themselves.”
A beat. She regards me with the expression she gets when something lands differently than expected. “That’s manipulative.”
“It’s also genuinely who I am. I’m actually easily distracted. The strategy and my nature are the same thing, which makes it harder to argue with.” I pause. “Is it working?”
She considers this seriously, which I appreciate. “Yes. Which is annoying.”
“Everything I do seems to be annoying.”
“Not everything.” She says it before she decides to say it. I can tell by the fractional pause after, the catching-up. She doesn’t walk it back. “You make it easier to be here.”
I look at her.
She’s looking at the stall row. Her gaze is faraway and her hands are in her jacket pockets. She is carrying something enormous and managing it with extraordinary precision. She just said something true without armor on it and is now waiting to see what I do with it.
I do the right thing, which is: nothing, immediately.
Through the partial bond, I can feel a myriad of emotions coming from her. Regret. Guilt. Sadness. But the worst one is fear. She’s terrified of something and it kills me to know she’s going through that alone. If she could just open up to me, I might be able to help. The whole pack would help, I know they would.
But… she has to let us in first. Which means waiting until she’s ready. So I just have to put up with these emotions until then.
“I’ve got something else to show you,” I say.
“Lead on.”
I get her to the maze by nine-thirty, which I hadn’t planned exactly. But the maze is empty at this hour and I know she would enjoy it. She walks in without hesitation, which confirms that.
The maze in daylight with the lights off is a different thing than the maze at night. It’s dimmer than outside but not actually dark, just shadowed, the canvas walls enclosing the space. We navigate the first two turns easily and she’s mapping it, I can tell.
“Left at the T,” she says.
“Right, actually. Left goes to the dead end.”
“I know. Left is faster.”
I look at her. “The dead end is faster?”
“Not through it. There’s a gap in the canvas on the east wall of the dead end. About shoulder-width. Takes you to the exterior corridor.”
I stop walking. “How did you—”
“Spatial memory,” she says, alreadyturning left. “Come on.”
I follow her into the dead end.
It’s a small space. That’s the design, the dead end is meant to feel like a mistake, close walls and a canvas ceiling and no exit. She goes straight to the east wall, finds a gap with the confidence of someone who discovered it days ago, and spins around to show me.
She turns and I am right behind her. The dead end is enclosed and I have been following closely. We are very near in the shadowed space, her back near the canvas wall and the gap behind her and me between her and the way we came in.
She looks up at me through long eyelashes like she’s perfected how to look at me like this. “Jack?”
