What if my first conscious shift cracks the blackout open and I remember everything — the basement, Curtis, the blood, what I did or what was done to me or what I couldn't stop?
What if I shift and I don't come back?
RJ didn't come back. Not all the way. He's still in there — I've seen it, the human behind the animal, the man who said my name like a prayer — but the shift took something from him. Gray clawed his way back but he's terrified of losing it again. Leo survived but he said it felt like dying.
And I'm next.
My body is doing it whether I consent or not. The heat, the strength, the senses, the mark — it's all prologue. My body is building toward something and every person in this facility knows it and nobody will say it to my face: Alex is going to shift. The question isn't if. It's when, and what happens after, and whether the girl who comes out the other side is still me.
I wipe my face. Breathe. Keep walking.
Sven doesn't ask if I'm okay. He knows I'm not. He walks beside me the way Stone walks — present, quiet, giving me the space to fall apart without making it a thing.
I don't fall apart. I pull it back. Lock it down. The tears dry. The performance reassembles.
But the fear doesn't leave. It sits in my chest next to the grief and the pull and the mark and all the other things my body is carrying that my mind can barely hold.
I'm going to shift. And I don't know what I'll be when I do.
Sven bypasses Cal's lab back to Red House — the long route through the admin building because he sees that I am barely holding on.
We're in the admin hallway, passing Gavin's office, when his radio crackles.
He stops. Listens. Something about Orange House, a resident, an escalation. His jaw tightens.
"Wait here," he says. Points to the bench outside the bathroom. "Don't move."
He's down the hall and through a door in three seconds.
I don't move. I sit on the bench. The hallway is empty. Gavin's office door is closed, but the one next to it — a smaller room, conference or storage — is cracked open. Voices coming through the gap.
I should ignore them.
I don't.
"— forensic re-review came back this morning. The specialist team in Anchorage ran the comparison —"
Gavin. I recognize the flatness. The precision.
"— and?"
A voice I don't recognize. Male. Older. Not Sven, not Stone, not anyone I've met. Someone on a speaker. The sound quality is thinner.
"Claw pattern analysis confirms what the initial report flagged. The spacing is six point eight centimeters. But the new analysis adds depth mapping. The claw marks penetrate the subcutaneous layer at a uniform angle consistent with a single sustained swipe, not repeated contact."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning it wasn't frenzied. Whatever made those marks did it in one motion. Controlled. Deliberate. That doesn't match a feral attack — feral wolves in shift produce chaotic woundpatterns. Multiple contact points, variable depth, signs of shaking or tearing. These marks are clean."
Silence. Then the other voice:
"Full shift?"
"No. That's the other finding. The bone structure wasn't damaged. In a full wolf shift, the jaw and claw dimensions produce injuries that include periosteal scoring — micro-damage to bone surfaces from the force of the bite. The James autopsy shows deep soft tissue damage but the underlying bone is intact. Whatever produced those wounds had the bite radius and claw span of a shifted wolf but not the full skeletal force."
"Partial shift."
"Consistent with partial shift, yes. Or a shift variant we haven't categorized."
