Chapter 7: Velmoor

Velmoor was louder than I expected.

Not in a bad way. Just in the way of a place that had not been designed around quiet, that had grown without a pack hierarchy deciding which sounds were appropriate and which were not. The train station opened onto a wide street, and I stood on the pavement with my bag on my shoulder and let the noise settle around me for a moment before I moved.

Nobody looked at me.

This was new. In Ironveil, the Omega brand on my wrist was visible the moment I pushed up my sleeve, and people adjusted themselves around it before they adjusted around me. Here I was, just a person with a bag who had just gotten off a train. Nobody had any information about me yet. The specific anonymity of that felt like taking off something heavy that I had stopped noticing I was wearing.

The apartment was a fifteen-minute walk from the station.

It was exactly as the listing had described and slightly worse in person. Fourth floor, no lift. A window that faced a fire escape rather than anything worth looking at. The carpet was the particular beige of something that had once had a color and had been slowly losing the argument. When I touched the radiator, it clicked once and then produced nothing.

I stood in the center of the empty room and did a full inventory.

Broken radiator. Ancient carpet. Fire escape view. Four walls with nothing on them.

Four walls that were entirely mine.

I unpacked my bag. It took eleven minutes. Clothes in the wardrobe. Books on the windowsill. Documents in the drawer under the bed. The toothbrush was in the bathroom, lined up on the left side of the sink because that was where I always put it.

I stood back and looked at the room.

Then I went to the corner shop at the end of the street and bought two plants. A small succulent that looked like it had survived at least one previous owner who had not been paying attention, and a spider plant with long pale runners trailing from a hanging pot. I carried them back up the four flights and put them on the windowsill next to my books.

The room looked like mine now.

I decided that was enough for today.

The research position at Velmoor Medical Institute starts in three days. I used those three days the way I always used new places: on foot, in expanding circles, learning the fastest route between points and noting the exits. The coffee shop opened at six. The library two blocks east is open late on Thursdays. The Tuesday and Saturday market with good produce and a woman at the far end selling second-hand paperbacks from a folding table.

I bought two of the paperbacks.

I spoke to no one who did not require speaking to.

On my first day at the institute, a junior researcher called Pol asked which pack I was from. He was a Beta, easy in the way of someone who had never had to think much about how he occupied space.

"Independent," I told him.

"New to the city?" he said.

"Yes."

"It gets easier," he said. Then he went back to his work.

I filed that away. Not because it was particularly meaningful but because he had said it like he meant it, without performance, and meaning things without performance was not something I had a lot of experience being on the receiving end of lately.

Three days in, late in the evening, I went to the forest preserve on the edge of the city.

I had found it on a map my second day in Velmoor, a long strip of old trees along the river, quiet at night, the kind of place you could shift without anyone filing a report about it. I had been saving it.

I shifted at the tree line.

The shift itself felt normal. What came after it did not.

I was larger. I felt it immediately in the length of each stride, the way the ground arrived sooner than expected, and the way branches I would have ducked under in Ironveil now cleared my back with room to spare. I ran a short distance through the trees just to feel it, and the running felt wrong in the specific way of a thing that is actually more right than you are used to.

I found a still pond near the center of the clearing, and I stopped at its edge.

The wolf looking back at me from the water was not the wolf I had been in Ironveil.

In Ironveil my coat had been dark grey. Omega grey. The color was the system used to mark rank from a distance so no one had to get close enough to read a brand. It was the color I had looked at my whole life in still water and puddles and once, memorably, in the glass front of a shop window during a shift that had gone sideways.

The wolf in the pond was not dark grey.

She was almost white.

I stood at the edge of the water and looked at her for a long time. She looked back at me with the same expression I imagined I was wearing, which was the expression of someone who has just found something in a drawer they did not put there and is deciding what to do about it.

I shifted back.

I stood in the dark in human form with my hands at my sides and the pond in front of me, and I thought about what I had just seen.

I thought, "That is not what an Omega looks like."

I thought, "I have been an Omega for twenty-two years." I know exactly what an Omega looks like.

I thought, "Hm."

I walked back to the apartment. I went up the four flights, unlocked my door, and put the kettle on. While the water heated, I looked at the succulent on the windowsill.

"Something is different," I told it.

The succulent did not have opinions about this.

The kettle clicked off. I made tea. I sat by the window with the mug in both hands and looked out at the city and thought about the wolf in the pond. White. Not the color the system had given me at twelve years old and built a whole classification around.

White.

This is mine, I thought. This room. This city does not know my name yet. This body is apparently not what anyone told me it was.

All of it is mine.

I sat with that until the tea was gone. Then I washed the mug, got into bed, and lay in the dark.

I thought about the pond.

I thought, if I am not what they told me I was, then what exactly am I?