Neither of them says what it is.
"Any gaps?" Lumi asks. "Moments you can't account for?"
I should lie. I should say no. I should protect myself the way I've protected myself in every institution I've ever been in — give them nothing, show them nothing, let them draw their own conclusions from an empty page.
"Yes," I say. "Seconds. Three this morning. More at lunch. I'm at the door before I know I moved."
Sven and Lumi exchange another look. Longer this time.
"I need to speak with Gavin," Sven says. Not to me. To Lumi. "And Cal."
"Sven. What did I just do?"
He looks at me. For a long moment, the enforcer and the person fight behind his eyes.
"I don't know," he says. And I believe him. And that's worse than any answer he could have given because Sven always knows. Sven has a protocol for everything. Sven manages risk inside a system built for threats he understands.
He doesn't understand this.
"The Board review is in four days," he says. "Until then, your movement is restricted to this building and your room. No yard. No lodge. No proximity to other residents without both myself and another staff present."
"You're caging me."
"I'm keeping people safe while we figure out what's happening." He holds my gaze. "You included."
He leaves. The door closes.
I sit on the couch. Press my hands between my knees to stop the shaking.
"What did I do, Lumi?"
She's quiet for a long time. The candle flickers. I can see her choosing her words, testing them, discarding them.
"You produced a vocalization in a register that caused an involuntary submission response in a shifter male at significant distance," she says. "That's what I observed."
"That's not what I'm asking."
"I know what you're asking." She meets my eyes. "And I don't have an answer yet. None of us do. What I can tell you is that your transition is accelerating faster than anyone anticipated, and the micro-blackouts suggest your body is accessing capabilities that your conscious mind hasn't integrated yet."
"Capabilities."
"I know that's not a satisfying word."
"It's a terrifying word. I growled and a man hit his knees. That's not a capability. That's —"
I don't finish the sentence. Because I don't have a word for what it is. Nobody in this room does. That's the whole problem.
I look at my hands. Still shaking. The same hands that bent a door frame. That gripped a chain-link fence. That pressed against a wall to feel a man through concrete. Hands that are mine and also belong to something else — something that lives in the gaps, in the seconds I lose, in the gold behind my eyes, in the sound that came out of my throat.
"What's happening to me?" I ask the Lumi who pulled feral wolves off a mountain and bonded with them and knows what a shifter becoming something looks like.
She looks at me. And for the first time since I've known her, she doesn't have a careful, measured, therapeutically appropriate response.
"I think you're becoming something we haven't seen before," she says. "And I think your body is further along than any of us realized."
Chapter twenty
Sven is late.
