“Point is,” I say, voice low, “I know what these walls do. They make you forget what the sky feels like. I don’t want that for you.”
“You’re part of the walls,” she replies.
“I know.”
We stop at the end of the hall where an old maintenance door opens into a courtyard roofed with wire mesh. Cold air leaks through the gaps, carrying the scent of rain and earth from far above. A thin strip of sky glows with the muted light of the moon.
Mary steps forward slowly, tilts her head back, eyes closing as she breathes in. For a moment the tension in her shoulders softens.
“I could run,” she says, voice quiet.
“You won’t.”
“You sound sure.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
I meet her gaze. “Because if you were going to, you’d have done it already.”
She huffs a sound that might almost be a laugh. “Maybe I’m just waiting for you to blink.”
“Maybe you are,” I say.
We stand there for a while, the cold seeping in through my coat, the faint smell of fox and wolf mingling in the air. She doesn’t speak again and neither do I. But she doesn’t run.
Standing there under a strip of sky inside a cage we both built, I feel something like a crack open inside me. Not guilt or pity.
Something like a choice.
7
MARY
The dream starts with snow, but not the kind that falls gentle and quiet the way it does outside the compound walls. This snow burns. It melts before it hits the ground and turns to steam, leaving the earth beneath it blackened, scarred, and wet with something thicker than water. I stand barefoot in it, the soil slick under my toes, and all around me the trees are whispering in a language older than anything I’ve ever studied.
Then she appears.
My mother does not look as I remember her. She isn’t bent by time, she isn’t weakened by grief, and she isn’t marked by the sacrifices that claimed her in the end. She looks younger, stronger, with her hair long and braided in the old way of our line, wolf totems woven into the plaits with bits of bone and polished obsidian. Her eyes are the same though, green like mine, sharp enough to cut and soft enough to make you believe you could rest in them.
“You’ve been holding too much,” she says. Her voice is low but it echoes through the trees as if the forest itself repeats herwords. “You carry them all as though your bones were made for burden. They were made for running, child.”
“I don’t run,” I say, though my throat feels thick.
“No,” she agrees. “You don’t. But you’ve forgotten what freedom feels like. You chain yourself tighter than they ever could.”
The steam curls higher, and I can see shapes in it. Wolves, old as the first snow, their forms shifting in and out of smoke. They circle her like guardians, their paws silent, their eyes the color of fire through fog.
“Your blood is older than theirs,” my mother continues. “Older than foxfire, older than Syndicate steel, older even than the Pact. You’ve forgotten it, but the wolf has not. She waits. She watches. She hungers.”
I want to ask her what she means, but the words won’t come. My jaw won’t move. My feet won’t lift. The wolves close in, and for one heartbeat their eyes are my eyes, and their growls are my growl, and then the ground cracks beneath me and I’m falling into the dark.
When I wake, my mouth tastes like iron.
The cell looks the same as it always does — stone, chains, silence — but my body aches like I’ve been running for days. My wrists burn from the cuffs, my throat is raw, and my head pounds in time with the hum of the vents. I pull myself upright slowly, my back scraping against the wall, and take a deep breath that does nothing to ease the pounding in my chest.
The door opens, and of course it’s him.
