A girl. Small. Young. Dark hair. Looking at me.
Not afraid. That was the part that didn't make sense. She was looking at me and she wasn't afraid. Everything is afraid of me. Animals. People. The other wolves on the mountain gave me space because my body was wrong — too big, too volatile, too far from anything that fit a category. But this girl looked at me and her face was —
I can't hold it. The image fractures every time I try to see more. Her face. Her eyes. Something about her hands. And then it's gone and I'm in the dark and my heart is hammering and the sound in my throat brings the staff running.
Did I hurt her?
The question lives in the space where the memory should be. If I could see the whole thing — the before and the after, the context, the room — maybe the question would have an answer. But all I have is the fragment. The girl. The eyes. The absence of fear.
And the feeling. The terrible, certain feeling that something happened after the part I can see. Something that the edge of the memory is protecting me from.
I don't want to remember.
I do.
I don't know.
After the first time the memory surfaced, I couldn't hold the words anymore. They slipped out of my mouth like water through fingers. The progress — the weeks of it, the slow careful building — crumbled in a week.
Cal didn't give up. He adjusted. Sat with me in silence when the words wouldn't come.
But I could see it in his face. The thing he wouldn't say. That whatever the memory was, it had cracked something that was trying to heal, and the crack was worse than the original wound because now there was scar tissue in the way.
They moved me to Feral Academy when itt was built. Supposed to help. Gray went to Gold House. I went to Red. Different buildings. Different categories. Gray: kept improving. Me: failure. The system sorted us the way it sorts everything — by what you can control, not by what you've lost.
Then she came.
I didn't see her first. I smelled her.
I was in the yard — the run, the small one, the chain-link box they put me in when the main yard is occupied. Pacing. The pacing is automatic. My body does it when there's nothing else to do, when the walls are close and the chain is short and the space between the fences is the only distance available.
The wind changed. West to east. And on it — something.
Fresh pine. Not the stale pine of the cleaning products they use on the floors. Real pine. The way it smells at altitude, in the cold, when the air is moving and the trees are breathing. And underneath the pine, open sky. I don't know how a person smells like open sky but she does. The particular clean vastness of air above the tree line, where the wind has nothing to carry but itself.
She smelled like the mountain. She smelled like home. She smelled like every good thing my body remembers and can't get back to.
She smelled like freedom.
And mine.
I didn't choose the word. The word chose me. It arrived fully formed, not in my throat but in my chest, in the place where everything that matters lives, and it wasn't a thought or a decision. It was recognition. The way your body knows water when you're thirsty. The way your lungs know air. A fact that preceded language by so long that language was just the latest, clumsiest way of saying what my blood already knew.
I stopped pacing. Turned. Found her — small, dark-haired, standing on the other side of the yard with the big man, Sven. Looking at the building. Looking at the fences. Looking everywhere but at me.
Then at me.
And the thing inside me — the feral thing, the thing that lost its words and its walking and its window — sat up. Lifted its head. Pointed itself at her like a compass finding north.
I want to be better.
That's the thing nobody writes on the clipboard. Not how I score on their charts. Not whether I hold human form long enough to pass inspection.
I want to be better.
I want to say her name without my jaw fighting me. I want to walk beside her the way Stone walks — heel, toe, arms at my sides, human. I want to sit in a room with her and hold a conversation and tell her — what? That her scent rewired something in me? That the night she stood in the dark and I said Alex was the first time a word came easy since the memory took everything back?
I want to tell her about the girl. The fragment. Because maybe it matters. Maybe my body knew her before my mind did.
