LOGINMIRA POV“So when a transfer goes past the safe limit,” I said, “the first sign is usually auditory. The carrier starts hearing the voice of the person they are carrying when that person is not present. Brief at first. Then more frequent.”The junior healer in the front row, the one who had brought me the questions, raised her hand. “How do you distinguish that from regular stress responses? Wolves under pressure sometimes report auditory symptoms.”“Good question,” I said. “The difference is specificity. A stress response gives you vague sounds, background noise, your own thoughts louder than usual. A transfer overload gives you one specific voice saying specific things. Things the carried person would actually say. It is very targeted.”“And the visual symptoms,” someone else said. “The shimmer you mentioned.”“Peripheral first,” I said. “Edges of the vision. Like looking through slightly dirty glass at the sides. It is intermittent early on and becomes more constant as the overload
MIRA POV“You are running near the front this year,” Petra said.“Yes,” I said.“Not the edges.”“No.”She looked at me with that face. The checking one. “Are you ready for that?”“It is a pack run,” I said. “Not a council session.”“It is also the first public run since everything happened and half the pack is going to be watching who ends up where in the lineup.”“Let them watch,” I said.She stared at me for a second. Then she grinned. “Okay,” she said. “Good. Yes. Let them watch.”The run started at dawn. That was the tradition Caius had reinstated when he took over, something the pack had let lapse under the previous Alpha. All wolves together, territory boundaries, the full loop. Not a race. Not assigned positions. Just the pack running the land it belonged to in the light that came before the sun was properly up.I had done this twice before.Both times on the edges, where the pack thinned out and the pressure of proximity dropped and I could run without anyone paying close att
MIRA POV“It is a bad day,” I said.He looked up from his desk. I was in the doorway of the home office, still in my coat, bag still on my shoulder. I had come straight from the healer centre and I had not quite made it further than the doorway.“Okay,” he said.Just that. Not what happened or are you alright or tell me what is wrong. Just okay. Said the same way he said any other fact.“Nothing specific caused it,” I said. “I want to be clear about that. Nothing went wrong. It is just a bad day.”“Okay,” he said again.He put his pen down. Closed the file he had open. Not dramatically, not making a big thing of the closing. Just done with it.“I was going to finish the Kellran correspondence tonight,” he said. “It can wait.”“You do not have to stop what you are doing,” I said.“I know,” he said. “I am choosing to.”I stood in the doorway for another second. Still in my coat. Still with the bag. The apartment was warm, that specific warmth it had in the evenings when the window was o
MIRA POV“There is a person,” Petra said.She said it like that. Not building to it, not with any particular energy. Just put it down on the table between us like she was setting something fragile somewhere and hoping nobody knocked it.I looked at her.We were at her flat. The lamp with the crooked shade. The tap doing its slow thing in the kitchen. She had made tea and now she was sitting on the opposite end of the couch with her mug in both hands and her eyes slightly to the side of me, which was what Petra did when she was embarrassed about something.Petra was almost never embarrassed about anything.“Tell me,” I said.“There is not that much to tell,” she said.“Petra.”“We have been messaging,” she said. “That is it. We have been messaging.”“Who is he,” I said.She pressed her lips together. The expression of a person deciding how much to give away. “He was at three of the inter-pack sessions,” she said. “A beta from one of the allied packs. He sat at the far end of the table
MIRA POV“I need to understand something,” I said.Sophia looked up from her desk. She had been writing something when I knocked and she had not looked particularly surprised to see me, which was one of the things about Sophia. She rarely looked surprised by anything.“Sit down,” she said.I sat.“He found it in the memories,” I said. “Days during the mission that felt lighter than they should have. He traced them back. He thinks the warmth of me carrying his memories was reaching him through the bond. Not thoughts, not memories, just the warmth of it.” I looked at her. “I did not know that was possible. I need to know if it is real or if he has made a mistake about what he felt.”Sophia held my gaze for a moment.Then she stood up and went to the bookshelf on the far wall. Not the main one. The narrow one in the corner that had older things on it, the kind of things that did not get referenced often but had been there long enough that she knew exactly where each one was without looki
MIRA POV“I found something,” he said.He was at the kitchen counter making coffee. His back to me. I was at the table with the Thursday session notes I had been putting in order, the questions from the healer centre junior staff all written out so I could prepare for them properly.“Found what,” I said.He turned around. Brought both mugs to the table and sat down across from me and he had the expression he had when he had been sitting with something for a while and had decided it was time to say it.“In the memories,” he said. “I have been going through them slowly.”“I know,” I said. “You told me you were not going to rush.”“I am not rushing,” he said. “But I found something I want to tell you about.” He wrapped both hands around his mug. “Not one of the hard parts. Something good.”I put my notes down.He looked at the table for a second. Gathering the shape of it.“Three years into the mission,” he said. “I was at the end of a particularly long stretch. The cover was holding but
MIRA POV“She knew,” I said.Petra looked up from her tea. Sable was still at the table. Neither of them said anything.“She knew what that safe house was and who was using it and what it meant to give away the location. She didn’t do it by accident. She didn’t stumble into it. She made a trip two
MIRA POV“How long have you been keeping these.”“Three weeks,” Petra said. “Since the gathering. Since I saw her watching you and Caius and making a phone call on her way out.” She smoothed one of the pages with the flat of her hand. “I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly. I just started no
MIRA POV“He said what.”“He said he dreamed about me,” I said. “On the river path. We were walking and he just said it. Like it was a fact he was reporting.”Sable sat down slowly at my kitchen table. He put both elbows on it and his face in his hands and he stayed there.I stood by the counter wi
MIRA POVAt five in the morning my apartment had that particular kind of quiet that was different from nighttime quiet. Flatter. The street outside had gone to its minimum, one car every few minutes, no voices, just the low hum of a city that had not quite started yet. I had been lying in the dark







