I look at him.
He looks back.
Neither of us moves.
Running footsteps break it. Then Sven rounds the corner and stops.
He takes in the hallway in one sweep, bodies on the floor, Leo on his knee, the Gold House guy with his hands over his head, Torres and his forehead. His gaze lands on me, sitting in the middle of it all, marked and human again and looking up at him with what I can only assume is an extremely compelling expression.
His eyes go wide. Just once, just a fraction, before his face locks back down.
He recovers in under two seconds. Of course he does. He's Sven.
"On your feet," he says.
The register in his voice drops into something I haven't heard before, command layered under command, the kind of voice that moves bodies before the brain catches up. Every wolf in the hallway stirs. Slowly. Carefully. Not one of them moving fast. They reassemble themselves into something like standing with the careful deliberateness of people coming out of a fugue state, and they do not look at me, and I let them not look at me, and Sven steps over Torres's ankle like it's a perfectly normal Tuesday.
He reaches down and offers me his hand.
I take it. Stand. My legs work fine. Everything works fine.
"Medical," he says.
"I'm fine."
"Alex." Same tone.
I want to argue. The argument dies somewhere between my brain and my mouth because Sven is already steering me toward the exit with the efficiency of someone who has already decidedwhere this is going and is simply waiting for my body to agree. His hand doesn't grip my arm — it's just present, a light pressure at my elbow, and I think about what it means that he touched me without hesitation when everyone else in this hallway went to their knees.
At the corridor's end I stop walking.
He doesn't push. Just waits.
I look back.
Leo is on his feet, the amber fading from his eyes, watching me go with his hands at his sides. The stranger is on his feet too, watching me leave with that controlled, precise expression, something underneath it that I recognize. The third arc pulls faintly in his direction and I press my wrist against my thigh and keep looking.
Then I turn around.
Behind me I hear Sven's voice, quiet and iron: "You. Office. Now."
I don't look back to see who moves.
The compound is cold. Morning light, thin and flat, hitting the snow between buildings. My breath fogs. The air smells like pine and frozen ground and somewhere underneath it the facility smell, industrial, and institutional. I've been breathing it for months. It hits differently right now, from the outside of the building, in a body that isn't quite the same one that went in.
We cross the open ground and I notice the way the two staff members we pass give us a wide berth, not rude, not afraid exactly, just a widening of the path. A step back. Eyes that don't quite land on me.
Word travels fast in a building full of wolves.
I keep walking. I have never felt this good after a shift. I have never felt this good at all, and I don't know yet what to do with that.
***
The medical bay. A doctor I don't know. Vitals. Questions I answer in monosyllables. She writes things down and I let her and stare at the ceiling and try to locate myself inside what just happened to me.
She's careful with me. No unnecessary contact. Instruments placed rather than pressed. When she takes my wrist to check my pulse she holds it at the edge, two fingers, and she doesn't look at the arcs even though I can feel her not looking at them. Her jaw is set.
My wrist is in my lap.
