"Understanding. Yours and theirs. If you understand what you are before they categorize it, you get to shape the narrative. If they categorize you first —" She shakes her head. "Don't let them define you before you've defined yourself."
The session ends. Sven is at the door. I stand.
"Lumi."
She looks up.
"Denied. Not undone. That means it's still happening. Even if I sit in my room and don't touch anyone and don't bend any more door frames. The bond is still happening."
"Yes."
"And there's nothing they can do about that."
Lumi almost smiles. Almost.
"There's nothing anyone can do about that," she says. "That's what makes it a bond and not a choice."
Sven walks me back. I don't speak. My wrist hums under my sleeve.
They can file their reports. Move up their timeline. Sit in their review and decide what category I belong in.
My body already decided.
And I am done denying.
Chapter thirteen
RJ
I was better once.
People forget that. The ones who write non-verbal and chain protocol on their clipboards. The ones who stand outside the door and look through the window and see the thing in the room and write it down and leave. They see this. They don't see before.
Cal remembers. Cal was there.
The medical center was small. Right next to Frosthaven Academy. Clean. Quiet. I had a window. I could see the mountain from my bed. Mostly I hung out with Gray. I could see the tree line and the sky. It was a room with a window and a bed and a door that they locked at night but opened in the morning.
Doc Neal ran tests. Gentle ones. He'd sit across from me with his glasses and his clipboard and he'd say a word and wait. Just wait. No pressure. No timeline. And something in my throatwould try to answer. Most of the sounds came out wrong — but some words stuck.
Tree. Cold. Water. Hungry.
Small words. Real ones. Each one felt like digging something out of deep mud. Heavy. Worth it.
Once I got to go outside. Not into a yard. Into the actual woods. Trees. Ground. The smell of pine and wet earth and the particular cold that lives at altitude.
Gray was there.
We didn't talk. Gray and I don't talk. We survived together on the mountain — years of cold and hunger and the raw animal business of staying alive — but surviving together isn't the same as knowing each other. The mountain was hierarchy and instinct and the constant negotiation of who eats first and who sleeps where and who backs down when the other one growls. We weren't friends. We were pack, and pack on the mountain meant something harder and simpler than anything the humans mean when they say it.
At the medical center, we both struggled.
I was getting there. Slower. Messier. But getting there.
Then the little girl.
I don't know where the memory comes from.
That's the thing that broke me. Not the memory itself — the not knowing. It surfaced one night at the medical center. I was sleeping, or close to it, in the room with the window and the view of the mountain, and behind my eyes something opened.
