Lights Out

AZIZA

He knew the compound in the dark the way I knew the servants' passages in the palace. I thought he had an impressive memory already. Every corner, every shadow, every place the torchlight didn't reach. We moved through it quickly and quietly and he didn't speak and I didn't speak and in seven minutes we were at the east gate and he stopped.

He let go of my wrist.

I resisted the urge to look at where he had been holding it.

"Tell me what you need," he said quietly. He was not looking at me. He was watching the gate.

I stared at him. "What?"

"The conditions," he said. "In the holding area. What do they need?"

I looked at him for a moment. "Water," I said carefully. "Access to it. The rope line is thirty feet from the nearest point and the guards aren't allowing movement after dark." I paused. "Shelter and heating. There are children in the group. It is cold in there."

He nodded once, still not looking at me. "It will be addressed."

He stepped back from the gate.

"Don't let me find you in the inner compound again," he said.

"I was lost," I said.

He looked at me then. Just briefly. "I know," he said, in a tone that meant the opposite.

Then he walked back into the dark and I went through the gate.

~

The omega quarters were a long, low building with bunk beds running along both walls and not enough space between them. It smelled of bodies and damp wood.

My bunk was on top. The one below it had a girl in it already, curled on her side facing the wall, and I climbed up as quietly as I could and lay down on my back and stared at the ceiling.

I was not going to sleep. I already knew that.

I thought about the records building I had seen on my way through the inner compound. Three guards on the door, two during the day. I thought about the patrol rotation and the gap in coverage on the eastern side between the second and third sweep. I thought about how long it would take me to find what I needed once I was inside, assuming I could get inside, assuming I could get close enough to the inner compound unseen, assuming I could do all of this without the Prince of Ironfang looking at me like he was already two steps behind me and closing the gap.

I pressed my mother's ring against my sternum.

"You can't sleep either," said a voice from below me.

I looked over the edge of the bunk. The girl had rolled over and was looking up at me with dark eyes and a round face and an expression that was almost cheerful, which seemed completely inappropriate given the circumstances.

"I'm Sena," she said quietly.

"Ana," I said. My cover name.

"Where are you from, Ana?"

"Duskfen. Eastern lowlands."

"Never heard of it," she said.

"Everyone keeps saying that," I said.

She smiled. It was a small smile but it was real and it did something annoying to my chest. "I'm from Thornwall. Western border pack. Ironfang absorbed us two years ago." She paused. "It gets easier. The first few days are the worst."

I looked at her. "Does it actually get easier or is that something people say?"

She considered this with more seriousness than I expected. "Somewhere between the two," she said. "You stop waiting for it to go back to normal. Once you stop waiting for that, the day gets shorter somehow."

I had nothing to say to that.

"You're very beautiful," she said, like it was a simple observation about the weather.

"That's a strange thing to say right now," I told her.

"It's going to cause you problems," she said. "I'm saying it as a warning, not a compliment. The ranked wolves here aren't careful about what they want and how they take it. You should know that."

I looked at her for a moment. "Thank you," I said, and meant it.

She nodded. Then she said, "Did you know the Goldencrest princess is unaccounted for?"

My heart stopped.

"I heard the soldiers talking," she continued, her voice even lower now. "They think she ran. Or died in the fire." She paused. "I hope she ran. I hope she ran far."

"Yes," I said, after a moment. "I hope so too."

We were quiet for a while.

Then she told me something about her first week in the Ironfang camp, something involving a cooking pot and a very senior gamma wolf.

The door opened.

The light came in hard and bright and a voice came with it.

"Lights out was two hours ago," said the guard standing in the doorway. He had a torch and a list and he was looking directly at our bunk. "Names."

They took us outside.

There were two of them, which I thought was unnecessary for two omega women who had been lying in their bunks talking, but I was learning that Ironfang's enforcement of rules had less to do with the actual infraction and more to do with the demonstration.

They made it quick. I will say that. The guards seemed to be enjoying themselves too much, grunting as each lash bit at flesh and opened it up.

Sena went first. She didn't make a sound, I noticed. She had done this before, or something like it, and she had learned how to go somewhere else inside herself while it was happening. I watched her and tried to learn it fast.

I did not entirely succeed. I yelped as the thin leather sliced at my back, peeling away skin and releasing fresh blood that perfumed the air. I was trembling when I was ordered to stand; the bitter air seeped into my wounds and chilled my bones.

Afterward they assigned us kitchen duty starting at dawn and told us to be grateful it wasn't worse and went back inside.

Sena and I stood in the dark outside the building for a moment.

"First few days are the worst," I said.

"Yes," she said, slightly breathless. "I may have undersold it."

~

Kitchen duty started before the sun was fully up and did not stop for what seemed like eternity. Wood fires, heavy pots, carrying water from the well in containers that had no business being as heavy as they were. My back was a specific kind of wrong. Every time I reached for something high my whole body reminded me of the night before and I breathed through it and kept moving because stopping was not an option and I was not going to let anyone in that kitchen see me struggling.

Sena was at the fire beside me, stirring something that smelled like it had been cooking since yesterday. She was upright but barely. There were shadows under her eyes and a carefulness to the way she was holding herself, stiff but managed.

By midmorning the kitchen was loud and hot and I was carrying a stack of bowls across the courtyard when the energy of the camp shifted.

I heard him before I saw him.

"What is the current ratio of kitchen staff to compound population?" asked Rhydian's voice, somewhere behind me.

A camp administrator was responding with numbers. I kept walking. I kept my head down and my pace even and I did not look.

"Stop."

I stopped because everyone stopped when that voice said stop.

I heard footsteps. Then he was beside me and I looked up and found him looking not at me but at my back, at what the uniform couldn't fully cover, and something his brows furrowed.

He looked at Sena. Then back at me.

"Who authorised this assignment?" he said to the administrator behind him.

"Standard consequence for lights out violation, my lord. Two hours past curfew—"

"I am not asking what they did," said Rhydian, and his voice had gone very quiet in the way I was beginning to recognise was worse than loud. "I am asking who authorised kitchen duty for wolves who were processed less than forty-eight hours ago."

Silence.

He looked at the administrator for a long moment.

"Get them off the roster," he said. "Today."

"My lord, the consequence was correctly—"

"Get. Them. Off." He said it one word at a time, with a threatening pause between each one, and the administrator stopped talking.

Rhydian looked at me then. Briefly. The same look as last night, meeting and holding for exactly a second before moving away.

Then he walked on and the camp exhaled around him. Sena appeared at my elbow and grabbed my arm.

"That," she whispered, with enormous urgency, "is either very good or very bad for you."

I looked straight ahead.

I was becoming increasingly concerned that she was right.