"This shouldn't exist," I say.
Dalton picks up his coffee cup.
"It does," he says.
I stay in the faculty guest quarters that night and lie awake looking at the ceiling.
Nineteen years at Luftis. The same families, the same frameworks, the same conversations dressed up as progress. And in every human school across Europe — latent wolves presenting alone. Without context, without support, without anyone who understands what is happening to them. Not because nobody cares. Because nobody has built the thing that would reach them before they present. Nobody has gone looking in the places the powerful families don't bother to look because their own children are already accounted for.
Frosthaven found this problem and built something around it. Imperfect, Tomlinson said. A productive mess.
Luftis hasn't found it yet because Luftis isn't looking. The committee would call it a resource allocation problem. The old families would call it unnecessary — their children are alreadyinside the walls, already accounted for, already tracked from birth. The ones outside those walls have never been anyone's mandate.
I could make it a mandate.
Not a satellite campus — too slow, too political. Something smaller first. A screening program. Partnerships with human secondary schools in the major cities. An identification track that doesn't require the student to already be inside a shifter institution to be found.
I reach for my phone, open a new document, and start typing.
By the time I set it down the Alaskan night has gone fully dark and I have four pages of notes and the beginning of something that doesn't exist yet.
I close my eyes.
In the morning I'll tell Tomlinson I'm staying a few more days.
I have work to do.
Chapter eleven
Alex
The dining hall empties out around us and without discussing it we take our coffee outside.
Just the three of us. The quad has gone quiet, the last students heading back to the dorms, the cold doing what it does. Jon has his coffee in both hands and he's looking at the campus with the expression of a man who has been looking at it all day and keeps finding new things to look at.
"The students," he says. "The ones who are close to presenting. There are more of them than Tomlinson's numbers suggest."
"How do you know," I say.
"Because I've been watching them move," he says. "There's a boy in the east dining section who seems to be experiencing improved hearing, jumping at noises. A girl near the library who stares at her hands like they’ve changed shape. Three others Icould name who are running at a frequency that's going to break surface within the next—" He stops. "Well. Soon."
"Have you met Lumi? I’ll bet she has already identified all of that. Lumi knows everything," Dalton says.
"She's remarkable," Jon says. "Completely wasted at this scale. Someone should be funding a Europe-wide program and putting her at the center of it." He looks at Dalton. "I'm going to steal that idea, you understand."
"It was never your idea," Dalton says.
"It will be by the time I write the proposal," Jon says.
I almost smile. I've been watching Jon and Dalton together for two days now — the rhythm of them, the old friction that became the foundation of something else, the way they argue like people who have been arguing long enough to enjoy it. Dalton is different around Jon. Looser. The professional surface still there but sitting lighter.
"Questions," I say. To Jon. "You said you had questions about the bond mechanics."
"Many," he says. "I'll start with the obvious one." He looks at me. "What does it feel like. Not the ignition — the ongoing. Day to day."
I think about how to answer that.
"Like knowing where someone is in a building without looking," I say. "Like a frequency. Each one is different. Leo runs warm and restless. Gray runs low and even. Dalton—" I glance at him. "Steady. Like a heartbeat you can check without touching."
