The room spins when I turn my head, so I’ve stopped turning it. I’m on a cot bolted to the wall, under a blanket that weighs nothing and does nothing. The cold isn’t in the room. It’s in me, deep, in the middle of my bones, and no blanket is going to reach it. It came on after the second draw, and it settled in and stayed. There’s surgical tape in the crook of both arms.
On the floor by the cot there’s a bottle of water I’ve been working on one sip at a time, because sitting up to reach it takes more energy than I have to spend. My hands are cold and far away, like they belong to someone in the next room.
The trays stopped coming a while back, so it’s night again. Morning feels like a long time ago. It also feels like an hour ago. I can’t make the two line up, and I’ve stopped trying.
Nobody was rough about any of it. There was no reason to be—where would I go? The man in scrubs found the vein first try, four times, and thanked me after each one, polite, like I’d passedhim something across a counter. That was the part I couldn’t grasp. Not the needle. The manners.
Serenity is somewhere I can’t reach, and I’ve stopped fighting that too. There’s a quiet where the fighting used to be, and the quiet is worse than the fear was, but it’s the only thing in here that doesn’t take anything out of me. Everything else has a cost now, down to lifting the water.
One thing hasn’t run out. Low under my ribs, faint as everything else but steady, the pull is still there, still pulling back down the river road, over the black water I crossed in the dark, up the mountain, to him. I’m empty everywhere else. Not there.
My eyes sink shut, and the spinning takes over.
Wake up. Wake up, Grace!
I’ve been here a day, and I’m already conscious, and that wrecks me, because I know this is what she’s been living through.
If she’s still alive.
She must be.
The handler said they had an offer. She wouldn’t say that if there wasn’t some truth to it. Why would she?
A sound works its way up through the floor.
It takes me a while to make anything of it. Voices, raised. Then an alarm starts somewhere far off in the building, two soft notes over and over, the mild kind that means a door’s been left open too long.
Then a different sound.
This one comes through the wall instead of the air, low and long, and it isn’t a machine, and it isn’t a man shouting. My mind turns it over and can’t place it.
My wolf doesn’t have to. She comes up off the floor of me all at once, ears forward, every hair on her lifting, and she isn’t afraid of it.
She knows it.
Him!
My heart starts pounding before the rest of me understands why. I get a hand flat on the cot.
Someone down calls out, sharp and strident. The shout turns into a scream, and then something cracks. An explosion. I think it’s an explosion. More screams. Glass shatters. Footsteps pound. Guards are yelling to each other.
What the fuck is going on?
But deep inside, beyond the fog of my blood-drained brain, things are falling into place.
The wolf knows.
And now, I do too.
Gunshots—three of them, flat and close together down the hall. Something answers, one short roar that I feel in my teeth, and after that there are no more gunshots.
It’s coming toward me. I can’t see it, so I track it by what the building loses on the way. A fire door goes down somewhere close, one heavy bang, no hinge-squeal—it didn’t open, it went flat. A man in the hallway shouts orders, two words, three, and then he stops. Something hits the far side of my wall hard enough to jar the paint loose in a line. Something drops.
I’m on my feet. I don’t remember standing, and I can’t feel my legs doing it. The wolf is holding me up while my body runs on empty.
A dark line spreads under the door and reaches across the concrete toward the cot. It’s too dark and too thick to be water. It’s blood, a lot of it, more than one person’s, and it’s still coming. Whatever is in that hallway has opened people up, and it’s between me and the only way out, and it is almost here.
Above all of it, the lights stay on, bright and white and steady. The building keeps working while it’s being torn apart.
