Chapter 171

Chapter 171RIVERAThe safe house felt smaller when everyone was inside it.We'd been spread across the city for four hours, each of us in a specific position with a specific role, the operational structure giving the space between us a purpose. Now that structure had collapsed back into a single room, and seven adults who'd been expecting a crisis and hadn't gotten one were occupying the same space with the particular tension of people who didn't know what to do with the alertness they'd built up and hadn't been able to spend.Louis was asleep. He'd been with Roy all evening, and Roy had gotten him down before the rest of us returned, which was one of the few clean outcomes of the night.Everyone else was at the table or near it, the debrief arranged around coffee that Bianca had made when we'd arrived back, which I'd been grateful for and had drunk half of before I'd fully tasted it.Klaus sat at the head of the table with the expression he used when he was processing something he h

Chapter 172

Chapter 172RIVERAI thought about her, earlier tonight. Sitting in the car outside the pack house, watching Matthew go in.Thought about what she'd said this morning. About Mia's car in the driveway, about sitting in the dark and making the call she could live with, about coming back.She'd come back.She was here, quiet at the end of the table, and the night had been long and nothing had gone as planned and she was tired in a way that had been building for days.I wanted to give her a better ending to the night than this debrief. Wanted to give her the clean resolution that she'd been working toward and hadn't gotten.I didn't have it. None of us did.The debrief wound down. There was nothing more to be said tonight that was going to produce useful conclusions—we were past the point of information and into the point of needing sleep to think clearly, and Klaus was the first one to name that."Get some rest," he said. "We work again in the morning."People moved. Elijah went to the r

Chapter 173

Chapter 173 BIANCA The barrier had a rhythm. It took me most of the first day to understand that, because the first day was mostly spent managing the concussion, keeping myself conscious through the headache that pressed behind my eyes like something trying to get out, drinking the water they brought me without tasting it, and waiting for my thoughts to stop moving through fog and start moving through air again. They fed me twice. A woman I hadn't seen before, not Voss, middle-aged and quiet with the focused expression of someone who'd decided that the person they were feeding wasn't a person in any way that required acknowledgment. She untied my hands each time under the watch of a second person who stood by the door, and retied them after. The rope was the same rope, charmed the same way. I tested it each time she retied it, carefully, the smallest possible movement, learning the specific quality of its resistance. The barrier was what I worked on in the hours between. My mothe

Chapter 174

Chapter 174BIANCAI worked.The join in the barrier had begun to respond to my attention. Not yielding—not yet—but changing in the way materials changed when you applied consistent pressure over time. A slight softening. A loosening of the tension in that particular section, the two practitioners' work beginning to separate at the seam in the way that joined things separated when one side was warm and the other was cool and the expansion rates were different.I was being the warmth.Slow, patient, continuous.In the gaps between pressing at the barrier, when I needed to rest the specific kind of focused attention that counter-resonance work required, I thought.I thought about the doppelganger.Voss had said it was built from my hair and memories. Hair was easy to access—I shed hair constantly, as everyone did. In the safe house, in the hospital, anywhere I'd been for the past weeks. Anyone who'd had access to spaces I'd occupied could have collected what they needed.That was a long

Chapter 175

Chapter 175MATTHEWBeta Adam came to my office at eight-thirty in the morning.I hadn't expected him. Had been sitting at my desk with coffee I hadn't touched yet, going through the messages that had accumulated overnight—pack members who'd been at the assembly, some of whom had written to say they'd been listening, some of whom had questions, a few of whom had said things that were harder to read and required more careful responses.Marcus had shown me to my office and then tactfully disappeared, which was his way of giving me time with something before he started organizing it. He'd been doing that more in recent weeks. Noticing when I needed the unorganized version of something first.Adam knocked and came in without waiting, which was his usual way. He was a big man, a few years older than me, with the particular bearing of someone who'd been in pack leadership his entire adult life and had the confidence that came from that. We'd had a complicated relationship across the years o

Chapter 176

Chapter 176 MATTHEW "So the dinosaurs should be safe." He buckled himself in with the efficient speed of someone who wanted to be buckled in so they could continue talking. "I've put the most important ones in the keep-at-home category, like we discussed. The middle-importance ones I'm bringing. And I'm bringing the Brachiosaurus specifically because it's the largest and if Biscuit has to carry something in his mouth I'd rather it be the one I'm least attached to." "That's strategic thinking," I said, pulling out of the drop-off zone. "I thought so too." He looked at me in the rearview mirror with the studied casualness of someone who was trying not to look like they were about to ask the question they were about to ask. "Have you thought about it any more?" I had thought about it. Had spent part of the morning thinking about it, running through the relevant factors in the way I ran through most things now—not just the fear version, not just the worst-case scenario version, but t