All Chapters of GIVEN TO THE WRONG ALPHA: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Silas stands in the doorway.Not breathing. Not needing to. Negative space with teeth, and the teeth are smiling.“Mother,” he says. “I’m home.”The Tree screams.Not words. Not weight. Fear. Old and green and deep. The roots under my feet flinch.Moira steps forward. Between me and him. Between him and thirty thousand people who don’t know they’re about to be zeroed.“You’re not,” she says. “Home’s full.”Silas tilts his head. Wrong. Too smooth. Like a puppet with no strings. “I am the other side. The after. The quiet.” He looks past her. At me. At the crown. “She ate for centuries. I will un-eat. Balance.”“Balance is bullshit,” Wrath snarls. Knife out. Thorns behind him.“Stop.” Draven’s command hits like a wall. “He’s not here. Not all of him.”He’s right. I can feel it. The thing in the doorway is a shadow. The rest of him is still in the cells. Still chained. Still pulling.This is a puppet.Made of nothing.“Rowan. Lights.”He slams the table. Backup gens kick. White floods the

Dawn in Duskbane smells like bread.Not blood. Not ash. Bread.Thirty thousand people slept on stone floors the Tree grew overnight, and Sky and Creek spent the whole night coaxing ovens out of the walls. Now the whole valley smells like a kitchen.I stand on the new wall with Draven and watch it. Families lining up for water that runs clear from rock. Kids chasing each other through wheat that wasn’t there yesterday. Guards — ours and the National Guard who walked in with the refugees — sharing coffee.Rowan comes up the stairs two at a time, laptop under his arm. He hasn’t slept.“D.C. is gone dark,” he says. “No press conferences. No statements. No flyovers. They pulled the cordon back fifty miles at 0300.”Draven frowns. “Retreat or regroup?”“Neither,” Rowan says. He turns the screen. It’s not a news feed. It’s social. Thousands of videos. #Duskbane. #WeBelieveYou. People packing cars. People walking. “They lost the narrative. The salute broke them.”The man in the suit saluting

The map is in my dreams again.Not paper. Roots.I see them under the dirt of America — thin green threads, sleeping. Not dead. Waiting. Twelve points of light, spread from Washington to Maine, from Texas to Montana.Twelve seeds. Like Hope.I wake with dirt under my nails even though I never left the bed. Draven is already dressed.“You saw them too,” he says. Not a question.The bond hums. He dreamed as the Alpha — running a forest that wasn’t there yet, wolves weaving between trees that sang.Eli is waiting in the kitchen with Jonah and Silas. Silas looks better. Human tired, not hollow tired. He’s eating actual food now. Bread. Stew. He flinches every time someone thanks him.“Twelve,” Eli says before I sit. “There were always twelve. The first pack didn’t just plant one Tree. They planted a circle. To hold the continent together.”Rowan pulls up a topographical map on his new laptop — Tree-grown casing, doesn’t fry anymore. “If you give me the points from the dream, I can overlay

We wake to the sound of sitting men.Rowan left the Appalachia livestream up all night on low volume. Thirty heat signatures around the young Tree on the coal ridge, not moving. At 4 a.m. one got up to pee. At 5 a.m. they shared water. Now at dawn, they are still there, in a ragged circle inside the thorn wall the Tree grew.“They haven’t tried to cut again,” Rowan says, rubbing his eyes. He has not slept either. “They just sit. The comments on their stream went from ‘burn it’ to ‘is that thing singing?’”It is singing. You can hear it through the cheap phone mic, a faint chime every time the wind moves the silver leaves.Draven crouches beside me, watching the feed over my shoulder. “A wall that doesn’t kill is more frightening than one that does,” he says. “They don’t know what it wants.”“Neither do we,” I admit.Silas has been listening since before we woke. He sits with his back against the D.C. central Tree, eyes half closed. “It doesn’t want,” he says quietly. “It is waiting fo

We sign the accord in the second classroom because there is no other room big enough that still feels honest.The first classroom is for lessons. The keep is for war. The courtyard is for bread. The second classroom is for asking, so we bring the table from the floor and let Hayes and his people take off their shoes at the door.Eli is better. He slept in the roots all night with Jonah curled against his side and Silas keeping watch. When he woke, his hands were his own again, thirty-five instead of seventy. He remembers everything, he says twice, as if saying it will make it stay. He remembers his first wife’s name. He remembers the day he cut Null out of Silas and how much it bled.He sits now in a chair that grew to fit his back, Jonah in his lap, and he does not hide his hands.Hayes did not come alone this time. The Park Service woman is back. The USDA man is back. There is also a woman in a plain blue blazer who does not give a title, only a first name, Mara, and who looks at th