Its eyes were sharp with pain. Exhausted. Furious. And underneath all of it — aware.
The vision shattered.
I slammed back into my body so hard I choked on my own breath. The plane was still humming, still bucking against the wind, but I couldn't feel it. I couldn't feel anything except the cold still clinging to my skin, the image of that wolf burned into the backs of my eyes.
"Lumi?" Cora's hand was on my shoulder. "Sweetheart?"
I was crying. I hadn't noticed until now — tears streaming down my face, hot against the cold that hadn't left me. My chest felt cracked open, hollowed out. Like I'd watched something die slowly and couldn't do anything to stop it.
"The mountain." My voice came out raw. Wrong. I pressed my face to the window, searching. "What mountain is that?"
Someone checked a tablet. "Denali. Highest peak in North America."
There. Rising from the wilderness like a fist. The place where something was suffering alone, fighting every day just to survive until tomorrow.
"Gregor." I turned to him, and my hands were shaking. "What's it called when wolves forget they're human?"
The cabin went quiet. Gregor's face lost its color.
"Why are you asking that?"
"Please."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then: "Going feral. It's called going feral."
"And if someone's been feral for years? A long time?"
"Lumi—"
"Please."
His voice went heavy. "After a certain point, there's no coming back. The human mind dissolves. Becomes purely wolf, purely instinct. If someone's been feral for years..." He shook his head slowly. "The person they were is gone. It's one of the greatest tragedies of our kind. Death while breathing."
Death while breathing.
The words landed like stones dropped into water.
But the wolf in my vision hadn't been empty. Hadn't been gone. Had looked at me with eyes that were exhausted and furious andaware— still fighting, still holding on, still waiting for someone to see that they were still in there.
Everyone said ferals were gone.
Everyone was wrong.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. The tears wouldn't stop, but something else was building underneath them now. Something that felt less like grief and more like refusal.
"I'm going to climb that mountain," I said.
"You're eleven," Gregor said flatly.
"Not today. When I'm older. When I'm ready." I looked back out the window at Denali shrinking behind us. At the place where someone had been abandoned to die slowly, and no one even knew they were still there. "I'm going to find him."
Cora squeezed my shoulder. "Find who, sweetheart?"
I couldn't explain. Couldn't make them understand what I'd seen — the limp, the cave, the eyes that hadn't given up even when everything else had.
"Someone who's been lost a long time," I said. "Someone who's still waiting."
Gregor was watching me with an expression I couldn't read. Concern, maybe. Or the beginning of belief.
