The healer comes back on the hour. She’s an older woman with cropped hair and a flat voice, and by the second visit she’d worked out how to be in here. She stops inside the door and says what she’s come to do before she does it.
“It’s okay. It’s me. Changing the bag. Checking her pressure. Two minutes.”
I move my arm off the rail and let her at the line. Every hour it’s the same, and every hour it’s like tearing a hand off something it’s gripping, and I do it, because Grace needs what’s in those bags more than the animal needs to hurt whoever touches her.
Nadia comes in behind her on the third visit, carrying two mugs. She stops where the healer stops.
“I’m going to sit against that wall,” she says. “I won’t come closer.”
I nod. She crosses wide of the bed, sets one mug on the floor by my boot, and takes the far chair with her own. She doesn’t try to make me talk. She looks at Grace for a while, and her jaw works once.
“She walked into that place knowing what it was,” Nadia says, quiet. “Whatever else gets said about it, I want it on the record that took more guts than anything I did this year.”
The coffee goes cold by my boot. I don’t reach down for it.
Viktor and Jericho come in past midnight, and the bear reads them at the door the way he’s read everyone—a beat of weight against the inside of my chest, then release. Jericho’s got a bandage above one eye. He sees me see it.
“Door frame,” he says. “Yours were all down. I found one still standing.”
“The site?”
“Cleared. Ours all walked out.” He pulls a chair around but doesn’t sit. “The wire came down before my count started, in case you were wondering how it reads in the report.”
“I know how it reads.”
“We’ll settle the fence another day,” Viktor says. He’s looking at Grace, and for once he doesn’t have a folder with him. “There’s a harder thing, and you’ll want it plain.”
I stand up without meaning to. The chair stays where it is this time.
“Serenity was not in that building.” He says it evenly. “We turned the site over before we pulled out. Nadia went through all the admin. Came up empty.”
“Intake numbers, draw grids, room logs.” Nadia’s voice has gone careful. “One Sangrey number in all of it. One. If her sister was ever run through that site, it was long before tonight. There’s no recent sign of her. No cell made ready. Nothing.”
“Whatever moved her,” Viktor says, “moved before Grace ever made contact. The paper doesn’t say where. We’re not done looking, but I won’t dress it up for you. Tonight, the trail out of that building is nothing.”
I went through that fence for two.
I sit back down. Grace traded herself for a sister who was already gone. The people who took the trade knew it. Somewhere out there Serenity is still being spent, and when Grace wakes, that’s the first thing she’ll reach for, and I’ll be the one sitting here when she does.
The room stays quiet a moment. Then Jericho puts the chair back where he found it, and Viktor says they’ll run through the details again in daylight, and they leave, Nadia last. Then it’s her breathing and mine.
Here’s the thing I can’t understand: The animal should be up. One of the two we went in for is missing, and he should be pacing to finish the business. He isn’t. He’s lying against the inside of me, heavy and easy, like the job came out right.
Back at her cell, with the change still halfway through me, I told Jerichothey’re here. I remember the words leaving mymouth. How did we get it so wrong?Her.The sister is still out there.
He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t take it either.
I put it down next to everything else I can’t fix tonight. I keep watching her.
Torbjorn is in the doorway an hour before dawn.
I didn’t hear him coming, which tells me how far gone I am, because nobody his size moves quiet enough to beat this animal on a normal night. He’s a wall of traveling coat in the doorway, pack still on one shoulder.
“Clan business,” he says, before I can ask. “A grizzly opens a building on Court ground, the clan hears before the blood’s dry, and then the clan answers for it. Viktor and I went over it an hour ago.” He looks at me. “You’re the mess I came to sort out.”
He comes two steps into the room and stops. His eyes go to Grace and stay there—a long look that doesn’t explain itself. His nostrils move once. Something crosses his face, and he pulls in a slow breath the size of a longer sentence.
He lets it out and picks a shorter one.
