Chapter 4

Mia caught up with me the moment the history room emptied.

"Okay, you have to tell me." She fell into step beside me, practically walking sideways to keep my face in view. "You corrected the teacher. From the actual source. You've been dead last since forever — how did you know that?"

"I put some time into studying," I said.

"Since when?"

"Since I decided I wasn't going to be who I was before."

It was the truest thing I'd said all day, and she had no way of hearing how true.

The dining hall was a wide, bright room that smelled of a dozen foods at once. Long counters ran the length of one wall, and behind the glass sat more choices than my soldiers had seen in a season — hot meats, three kinds of bread, fruit in the dead of what the calendar swore was autumn, things in colors I had no names for.

In my time, food was something soldiers prayed for. Here, children left fruit untouched on their trays.

I had ten dollars folded in my pocket. Selah's memory told me that was worth, in this world, almost nothing — a silver coin, maybe, in mine. I bought the cheapest tray on the line and it still took half of what Helen had pressed into my hand. Five dollars for a bowl of rice and beans. I carried it to a table and sat, and for one quiet moment I let myself simply be hungry, and about to eat. It was, I thought, a strange kind of peace — to worry about nothing larger than lunch.

Then a shadow fell across the tray.

"Enjoying yourself?"

Delilah stood over me with a girl at each shoulder, and the good humor was gone from her face. Whatever I'd cost her in the courtyard and again in that classroom, she meant to collect it now, in front of an audience.

"You've spent all morning forgetting your place," she said. "Let me help you find it."

Then she reached for the thing that had always worked.

I felt it move through the room before I understood what it was — Selah's memory naming it a half-second late. Alpha aura. Power rolled off Delilah in a hot wave, and around us the hall responded. Students at the next table dropped their eyes. One boy's knees dipped before he caught himself. The two girls behind her bowed their heads on instinct, and even Mia, beside me, made a small sound and gripped the edge of the bench.

"Kneel," Delilah said. And she put the whole weight of her blood behind the word — the alpha voice, the command that a lower wolf's body obeys before the mind can argue.

It broke against me like water on stone.

If Selah had still been in this body, she would already have been on the floor. That was what the alpha command did — it reached beneath thought and forced a wolf to obey.

But there was nothing in me that knew how to kneel.

I picked up my spoon.

"You—" Delilah's face went slack. The aura guttered as her concentration broke. "You didn't kneel. That was an alpha command. Why aren't you kneeling?"

"That was an alpha command?" I looked up at her, unhurried. "I've heard stronger from a pup that hadn't opened its eyes."

The hall, which had gone silent under the aura, filled with a low rush of whispering.

Delilah's mouth opened and shut. I watched the certainty drain out of her, and I understood something about her that she didn't understand about herself: she had never once won anything. She had a loud voice and an alpha's blood and a habit of standing on smaller people, and had mistaken obedience for strength.

She felt the ground going and reached, instinctively, for someone to stand on. Her head turned.

"Callan." She found him at the edge of the crowd, and her voice climbed toward something like pleading dressed up as command. "Are you going to just stand there? Your little admirer thinks she can challenge an alpha. She has no respect for her betters."

Betters. Two hundred years ago no wolf I knew would have used that word and meant a rank. We measured each other by what we'd carry and who we'd bleed for. This world had traded all of that for a ladder and a set of instincts, and called it order.

Callan had been leaning against a pillar with his hands in his pockets, watching, saying nothing.

Something in Selah's chest tightened when his gaze moved — that same traitor pull, the body remembering a wanting the soul had never signed. I let it come and let it go. It was hers, not mine.

He pushed off the pillar.

"Delilah." His voice was flat with distaste. "You've been screaming at a girl over her lunch and calling it dignity. You're embarrassing yourself, Delilah."