“You don’t know what they do with them. Nobody knows for certain—”
“The woman I was with. Willow.” Saying her name costs me something I don’t examine. “She had a cousin. Seventeen years old. The Syndicate had him. They cut him open. Tortured him. He barely survived. He was seventeen, Ma. And we’ve been sending wolves younger than that into the same system.”
My mother’s face doesn’t change. But her hands—folded in front of her—tighten against each other. The knuckles pull taut.
“She told you that,” my mother says. “The magic-blood girl. You’re taking her word over your family’s.”
“I’m taking the evidence. The ledger. The payments. Dad just confirmed they paid more for children. What kind of program pays a premium for kids?”
The question hangs in the evening air. The garden is still. The western ridge is losing its gold, the shadows stretching across the compound like creeping fingers.
My mother looks at my father. He doesn’t look back. He’s staring at his hands, flat on the chair arms, trembling.
“We did what we had to do,” my mother says, her jaw set.
“Tochildren, Ma!”
“Magic-bloodedchildren, Conner,” she snaps back. “They hardly matter.”
I stare at her, speechless. This woman who birthed me. Raised me. Guided me through my first shifts. Held my hand when we walked into church together.
And I don’t recognize her.
I stand. I can’t be here. Can’t sit on this porch with these people—my parents, my blood—and process what they’ve done. What I’ve helped them do. For years.
“Where are you going?” my mother asks.
“Out.”
“Conner—”
“I need to think. And I can’t do it here.”
I walk off the porch. Past the garden. Past the training grounds where Tate is still running drills. Past the barn my grandfather built—the one where you shelter the animals first, because the animals don’t have a choice.
The animals don’t have a choice. The wolves we relocated didn’t have a choice. The children we loaded into trucks didn’t have a choice. And I didn’t give them one, because I believed the story my father told me, and I never asked what was on the other end of the road.
I get in my truck. Drive east, toward the Brennan hollow where the Oklahoma family camped weeks ago. I park where I parked then, sit on the ridge, and look at the empty clearing below. The dead fire pit, the tire tracks in the mud, the absence where people used to be.
They were clean. No magic. I let them stay.
If they’d had magic, I’d have walked them to the junction. Called the number. Waited for the truck. And the money would have come, and the ledger would have gained another entry, and two more children would have vanished into a system built on my sister’s grave and paid for in increments that increased with youth.
My wolf makes a sound. Not a growl, not a whine. Something raw and low and sustained, like an animal caught in a trap it can’t see, pulling against a wound that gets worse with every movement.
I sit on the ridge until the stars come out. I think about Maren. About the stray wolf who lost control of a ward and killed a fourteen-year-old girl who wanted to see everything and go everywhere and know everyone. I think about how that death turned into a program that has now, according to the ledger, processed thirty-seven wolves across a decade. Wolves who went south and didn’t come back.
I think about Willow. Her voice at the swimming hole, talking about a cousin who was cut open. Her voice in the diner, asking questions I knew meant something more than curiosity. Her voice in the dark of my house, saying my name like it meant something.
Was she lying? About all of it?
The enforcer says: She lied about everything.
The wolf says: Not everything.
The man says: I need to find out.
I pull out my phone. Stare at the screen. At the text that arrived the night everything changed.