Chapter 1
Briar
I wrap the rabbit in a flannel shirt and tuck it into the bottom of my pack.
Button eyes, matted fur, one ear worn down to a nub by hands too small to be careful. It came from a cardboard box in the Syndicate facility’s storage room, filed alongside shoes, and drawings, and a child’s jacket with the zipper still done up. Each box had a number, not a name. Each box held everything a victim was carrying when they arrived, taken at intake and put away with the tidiness of people who kept meticulous records.
I took the rabbit during the extraction. No one stopped me. The corridors were filling with smoke, Jericho’s fire turning the sky orange, and the bastards who ran the place were too busy dying or running to notice one woman walking out with a stuffed animal.
No one’s asked me about it since. No one asks Briar much of anything, which is one of the advantages of being the kindof person who answers in monosyllables and keeps her door locked.
I open the pack and check the contents. Knife, med kit, zip ties, tranquilizer kit. Merric’s stores have a wolf-grade sedative strong enough to drop an elephant. Or an alpha. I “requisitioned” two doses yesterday from the equipment locker while Dane was at the barn. He won’t notice them missing. No one inventories Merric’s field supplies this soon after an operation.
The cabin is already stripped. Bed bare, closet empty, nothing on the walls. It looked this way when I moved in, and it looks this way now, because I never unpacked. My bag sat beside the cot the way it always sits—positioned, not settled. Ready.
I spoke to Arden at dawn.
She was outside the healers’ building with Lachlan beside her, the two of them sitting on the step in the early light. He was whittling. She was staring at nothing, which is what Arden does when her mind is somewhere else.
I sat on the step below her.
“I need to talk about the storage room,” I said. “The boxes.”
Her eyes came back from wherever they’d been. Lachlan’s knife went still.
“What about them?” she said.
“The intake records. How were they organized?”
“By origin point.” No hesitation. “Codes for each feeder region. Every wolf that came through a specific corridor was tagged on arrival. The Forresters were one. Code F-7.”
I had a notebook out, small and spiral-bound, the kind you can fit in a jacket pocket. I wrote F-7 and underlined it twice.
“The items in the boxes,” I said. “Were they inventoried?”
“Down to the last sock.” Her voice didn’t change. “They put it all on the intake form.”
“The wolves themselves,” I said. “Were they tracked the same way? Codes instead of names?”
“Numbers.” She said it flat, like a fact about weather. “Once you came through intake, your name was gone. I was Two-Nineteen.”
I wrote it down. Arden—219.
“Some of them I knew by their real names,” she said. “Others, only by numbers. It depended on when they came in, how long they’d been there, whether they still remembered who they were.” She paused, sorting through memory the way the facility sorted through its files.
“Josiah Whitcross was Two-Twelve. Ravenclaw. Older wolf, maybe sixty. He kept a calendar scratched into the wall behind his cot with a piece of wire. He told me he had a daughter named Esme who was taken six months before him. She was One-Eighty-Nine.” A brief pause. “She didn’t make it through the first winter.”
I wrote both names. Both numbers.
“He didn’t make it out?” I asked.
“Died fourteen days before the extraction. Infection that developed into sepsis. They didn’t treat it. He’d probably outlived his usefulness.”
Lachlan’s whittling knife rested on the step beside him now. His hand stayed on Arden’s shoulder.
“There was a boy,” Arden said, and her voice thinned for the first time. “Small. Five, maybe six. Number Forty-Seven. He’d been there longer than me. The older captives said he came in as a toddler. He didn’t know his name. He didn’t know he had a name. When I asked what to call him, he held up four fingers and then seven.”
I didn’t write that down.