CHAPTER 4: SEVENTY-TWO HOURS

The music started before I reached the end of the corridor.

Drums. Deep and celebratory, pounding through the stone walls like a second heartbeat replacing the one that had just been ripped out of my chest. They were already celebrating. The bond was barely cold and they were already drumming for someone else's future.

I walked faster.

The omega quarters were empty. My room was exactly as I had left it. Narrow bed. Thin mattress. The cracked mirror. Three jars of healing paste on the shelf.

Seventy-two hours. Escorts to ensure compliance.

I pulled the cloth sack from under my bed. The same one I had owned since I was twelve. The only thing that survived the fire that killed my parents. I had never packed it before because I had never had anywhere to go.

I packed it now. Two changes of clothes, both worn thin. My small knife with the wooden handle. The three jars of healing paste wrapped in cloth. My entire life fit inside a sack barely larger than a pillow.

I was tying it shut when the door opened.

Mama Sira stood in the doorway. She had been crying. I could see it in the swelling around her eyes and the way her jaw was clamped too tight, holding her face together by force. She looked at the sack. She looked at the empty shelf. She looked at me.

"You're not waiting for the seventy-two hours," she said.

"If I wait, they assign escorts. Escorts mean labor pack. No detours. No choices." I pulled the cord tight. "I leave tonight while everyone is celebrating. The guards will be watching the party, not the gate."

"You don't have shoes, child."

"I've never had shoes."

The words came out harder than I meant them to. Mama Sira flinched. Nine years in this pack and nobody had given the omega kitchen girl a pair of shoes. Not because they could not afford it. Because she had never been real enough to them to need any.

She reached into the folds of her clothing and pulled out something small. Wrapped in faded dark blue cloth and tied with a thin leather cord. It fit in her palm. She held it out to me.

"What is this?"

"Your mother gave it to me. The night of the fire. Before." Her hands were shaking again. "She said, if something happens to us, hold this. Give it to Amara when she has to leave."

The room went very quiet.

"When she has to leave. Not if?"

Mama Sira's eyes were bright and terrible. "Your mother knew things, child. Things she never explained. Things I never asked about because the answers scared me more than the not knowing." She pressed the bundle into my hand. "She said you would know when to open it. Not before."

The bundle was warm. Not the kind of warm that came from being tucked inside clothing. It was pulsing. Faint, rhythmic heat that matched my heartbeat exactly. My fingers tingled where they touched the leather cord.

The same tingling I felt when my palms heated against the stone floor of the great hall.

I shoved the bundle into my sack before Mama Sira could see my fingers trembling.

"Where will you go?" she asked.

"East. Into the wild territory between the packs. The borders don't overlap there. If I reach it before the escorts are assigned, they have no jurisdiction."

"That territory is full of rogues. Ferals. Wolves who have lost their minds."

"Then it's full of wolves with nothing to lose." I pulled the sack onto my shoulder. "Same as me."

Mama Sira stepped forward and pulled me into her arms. She held me the way she had held me the first night I arrived at Silver Ridge. Twelve years old. Smelling like smoke and grief. My parents' ashes still in my hair. She held me like she was pressing nine years of unspoken things through her skin and into mine.

"Survive," she whispered. "Whatever happens. Whoever you meet. Whatever you find out about yourself. Survive first. Everything else comes after."

Whatever you find out about yourself.

I pulled back and searched her face. There it was. In her eyes. She knew something. Not everything. But something. About my hands. About my mother. About the warmth that pulsed inside me like a second heartbeat.

"Mama Sira. What did my mother tell you?"

Her mouth opened. Then closed. Her fingers tightened on my shoulders, released, tightened again. Whatever she knew, it was sitting right behind her teeth.

"Go," she said instead. "The celebration lasts another two hours. After that the guards rotate and you lose your window."

She pushed me gently toward the door. Her hands lingered on my shoulders for one second. Then she let go and the distance between us filled with everything she would not say.

I moved fast through the back hallways, past the dark kitchen and the storerooms, and out the heavy wooden door at the rear of the pack house into cold night air.

The yard was silver with moonlight. The gate stood tall at the far edge, sharpened logs against the sky. Two guards, both young, both watching the pack house windows where light and music spilled out. Neither was looking at the gate.

I crossed the yard. Bare feet silent on packed earth. The sack pressed against my back. The bundle pulsed warm against my hip.

I reached the gate. The latch was cold under my fingers. I lifted it. The wood groaned.

One guard turned. He squinted through the moonlight. He saw me. He saw the sack. His face moved from confusion to recognition to the flat blankness of a man deciding that what he was seeing was not his problem.

He turned back to the windows.

I pushed through the gate.

The forest stood in front of me. Dark. Vast. Alive with sounds I could not name and dangers I could not see. One step from the only life I knew into whatever I could build from the wreckage.

Behind me, the drums celebrated someone else's future.

I stepped forward. The ground changed under my bare feet. Cold dirt. Wet leaves. Roots and stones and the raw, untamed skin of a world that owed me nothing.

And inside my sack, pressed against my hip, my mother's bundle flared hot. Not warm. Hot. Burning through the cloth like a coal pulled from a fire. Burning in perfect rhythm with my heartbeat.

As if it had been waiting for me to leave.

As if it had been waiting for me to choose.