Chapter 28

I tore through the streets of Supplicants Grove, dodging people left and right. Standards stood on every corner, innocent, oblivious. Mr. Bicks wasn’t coming to take me away from them this time. They had no idea what was in their midst …

“Millie!”

I stumbled to a stop, clutching my side. Gret sprinted up and grabbed me by the shoulders.

“Are you —?”

“Yes!” I gasped.

“I got you,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I was panting too hard to start running again. Walking casually but briskly, Gret put her hand on my back and guided me toward the squat. I tripped and lurched beside her.

“How long do you have from right now?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s different every time.”

“Does anything hurt?”

“Not yet.”

“Good. We’ll get there.”

All of the anguish of the previous day was gone from Gret’s voice. She was the picture of calm: her breathing regular, her expression clear. She hurried but did not rush. As we walked, she took my hand. I tried to pull away, not wanting her to feel the awful hair, but she held me fast.

I swallowed hard. “Where will we go?”

“Home.”

“The squat?” I said, my voice squeaking. “I can’t do it there!”

“Where did you think we would go?”

“To the desert. Where there’s nobody around.”

“No way,” Gret said. “I’m not going to spend all night herding you like a goat. We’re keeping it nice and enclosed, at least for this first time.”

This first time. Out of how many?

“People will hear me. I’m really loud,” I said.

“No one lives near us. The shops are closing. Barely anyone even uses that laundromat.”

I tried a new tactic.

“What about the others?”

“There are plenty of abandoned buildings around here. Sandra and I used to squat-hop until we found a long-term place. We’ve always had escape routes, in case someone ever came looking for one of us.”

“But Luc …”

“Sandra and Rosie will take care of him,” Gret said. “Everything is going to be fine.”

A small sob escaped me. Gret’s calm flickered.

“Is it starting?”

“No. I’m just …”

She held my hand tighter. “We’re almost there.”

With every step, I was sure that the transformation would start and that I would be set loose on the streets of Supplicants Grove, but the pain hadn’t even begun by the time we got to the squat.

“Wait outside while I clear the others out,” Gret said.

That was for Luc’s sake, I knew, but he would have to pass me anyway. I sank down against the wall and brought my knees to my chin. The hem of my shorts rode up over my scars. They were angry and inflamed.

Sandra was the first one out the door. Rosie had apparently found her, and from the look Sandra gave me, she knew I’d seen what she had done. Was it just me, or was she squinting, even with her glasses on? She leaned down and planted a quick kiss on the top of my head.

“Gret’ll see you through,” she said.

Break it back, I thought, my heart tearing in half.

Rosie brought Luc out next. The bedroll I’d used the night of the storm stuck out of the pouch on the back of his wheelchair. He was curled up with discomfort, and he winced away from me.

“Good luck,” he whispered.

Rosie sped away with him, but she tossed a sweet, sharp-toothed smile over her shoulder at me.

Gret hauled me to my feet and took me inside. I fled to the bathroom and stayed there much longer than I needed to. In the mirror, I saw the face the camera recorded before every transformation. I was more corpse than girl, except the dead were supposed to be peaceful.

Gret was waiting for me back out in the hallway. The doors to the front room, the bedrooms, and the kitchen were all securely shut. The hallway was bare except for a bottle of water and a blanket.

“I’ve been thinking —” I started.

“That you should go back to the compound?” Gret said. “No way.”

She didn’t sound angry, but she clearly wasn’t willing to hear arguments. I ground my teeth. Rosie had officially passed her test, considering no EP guards had descended upon me with silver-loaded guns. If I called them, I’d have to explain the band’s failure, but surely I could think of something.

“Mr. Bicks would be stupid to kidnap me now,” I said.

“I’m not worried about now,” Gret said. “After it’s over, you’ll be defenseless again.”

With a wet snap, the fingers on my right hand arced back, and my arguments ceased to matter. I swallowed a cry and slid down the wall, cradling the broken bones against my chest. Gret crouched next to me and held out her hand.

“Let me see,” she said.

I stared at her outstretched palm. It was covered with hair.

“What’s wrong?” Gret asked.

“Your hand …”

“I’m gonna transform with you.”

“I didn’t know it did that,” I whispered. “I didn’t know that … that real …”

Mr. Patter, Mr. Bicks, and even most of the nurses had always reacted to my hairy palms with poorly hidden disgust. I’d assumed they were another mistake Dr. Topher had made. But Gret’s hand looked just like mine.

My ribs moved. Frantically, I braced myself against the spasm until it ended, but when it did, I was a different shape inside. The hallway was narrow, but right now it felt huge. I needed a cage.

“Millie? Millie!” Gret’s voice was right next to me. She lifted a stray lock of hair out of my face. With her brows knit and her eyes locked on mine, she was as stunning as she had been in the greenhouse.

I pushed myself away from her, sliding along the wall. Cartilage crackled in my ears. This was happening even faster than last time. Fury gnawed at the edges of my mind, but anger was so near to me these days that I honestly didn’t know if I could blame it on the transformation.

My feet curled and stretched, bound by my sneakers. I gasped and fumbled at the laces. Gret took over, easing the battered canvas off as carefully as she could.

“How could Topher do this?” she muttered. “How did she fuck things up so bad?”

It wasn’t anything I hadn’t wondered before, but to hear it from Gret was more than I could bear. I jerked away from her, crying out when my dislocated shoulder hit the wall.

“Shit,” Gret said. “I didn’t mean you’re a fuck up.”

“Not helping!” I choked out.

“Millie, come on. You know what I mean, right?”

“Sure,” I said. Tears sprang to my eyes. “Dr. Topher was supposed to be a genius, but she wasn’t, was she? Not if she thought she could make someone like you out of someone like me.”

“That’s not it!” Gret cried.

There was pain in her voice, and I was the cause of it. The list of people I hurt grew longer every day.

“You don’t have to stay here,” I said.

“Say that again and I’ll bite you.” Gret pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. When she lowered them, she had regained some of her composure. “Can you relax at all?”

I laughed in her face.

“Okay, that was a dumb question,” she allowed. “You just seem like you’re fighting the transformation.”

“Of course.”

“Don’t.”

A violent tremor passed through me. Gret didn’t say anything. She must have thought it was just the transformation.

“We can fight it, too,” she explained. “Like if we’re not sure if this is a good time to be transforming, or something’s screwing with our heads. But you can’t half want it.”

“I don’t want it at all,” I protested.

“Well, it’s gonna happen anyway,” Gret said. “So just let it.”

I shook my head.

“I really think it’ll hurt less,” she said, like that mattered.

“I don’t care.”

Gret’s face turned stony again.

“You have to care. You can’t just accept —”

Another spasm struck. I held on as tight as I could to that invisible cliff and fought the shifting muscle and sinew with everything I had.

“Millie, stop!” Gret cried. “Just stop it!”

“I won’t do it again!” I yelled. Blood from my tearing throat flew from my lips. “I’m not a protector! That’s not what she put in me! I’m a weapon!”

EP may not have figured out exactly what Dr. Topher had added to my adaptation, but I was sure to the marrow of my breaking bones that it was violence. She wanted me to be powerful, and she didn’t know any other kind of power.

Gret’s eyes were wide. They traveled the full length of my crumbling body, then rose again to my face. Slowly, she reached out and held me by the shoulders. The thick hair on her palms was soft on my searing skin.

“There’s no one here you can hurt,” she said. “I’m not a threat. You know I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

“The wolf won’t care,” I whispered.

“I’m not scared,” Gret said.

The tears in my eyes fell. Gret wiped them away, then stood and returned to pragmatism.

“You should probably get out of your clothes now,” she said.

I shook my head. Not without a cage to cover me.

“They’re gonna rip,” she pointed out. “I have a blanket for you.”

Of course she did, I thought as she went to retrieve it. She was the one who thought of freaking everything. I crawled to the bathroom and stripped with fumbling hands, wrapping myself in the blanket. When I came back out, Gret had taken off her boots.

“I’d rip my clothes, too,” she explained.

Gret undressing would have been cause for alarm at any other time, but my spine had begun to stretch beyond the boundaries of my body. Tentatively, I stopped straining against it, but I resumed the fight a second later. Clanging silver rang through my head.

Every cell of my body was aware of Gret beside me. Even with my eyes closed, I knew exactly how far away she was, and how quickly I could close that distance with claws or teeth. Gret waited until I’d stopped moaning, then leaned over and placed her hand on the blanket against my heaving side.

“If I help you, can you lean on the wall on your hands and knees?” she asked.

My eyes closed tight, I nodded. With steady hands, she lifted my fracturing form, propping me against the wall. I could only put weight on my left knee and my right elbow, but I remained upright.

Gret knelt beside me in the same position. Her body pressed against mine through the blanket.

“This is what we do for kids,” she said. “Watch.”

I opened my eyes. Gret took my slack hand and placed it on her shoulder. Then …

She transformed.

It was amazing. She was amazing, the whole way from girl to beast. I felt the smooth transition of bone and muscle beneath my hand, the rich coat of fur that wound through my fingers. In half a minute, a dark eyed wolf looked into my face. Her breath was hot against my cheek, and I could see the ends of her long, perfect teeth. My pain stopped, if only for a fraction of a second.

A real werewolf. In my whole life, I had never seen anything so beautiful.

Then she changed back, and she was Gret again, except she had been Gret as the wolf, too. She had never gone away.

“We show them,” she said. “We let them touch us so they’re not afraid. Then they do what we do.”

“You bite them, too. You can’t do that for me,” I said, not sure if I was telling her or asking.

“No,” Gret said, quickly enough that I knew she’d thought about it. “I don’t know what that would do, since you’re not — I wouldn’t want to make things worse. But just pay attention to how I change —”

“It won’t work,” I croaked. “Dr. Topher showed me videos of transformations. She told me to change like them. That’s how —”

“Fuck videos,” Gret said. “Feel.”

She transformed again, slower this time, and I understood. I felt the way everything was supposed to fall into place. My shoulder popped. I closed my eyes and visualized the shape the joint would take as a wolf, instead of the girl-shoulder I wanted to keep. I poured all my awareness into that one area of my body, like I’d done so many times before.

I focused on Gret’s steady breathing. I didn’t want to hurt her. I was more certain of that than I was of anything else. I hoped it would matter.

I let go.

The transformation quickened. The picture in my mind vanished.

“It hurts!” I wailed.

Gret pushed against me. I pushed back, and I didn’t fight it, and …

My shoulder started to shift like I told it to, the way my hand reached for an object when my brain wanted to pick something up. It was like making myself walk into fire, but I did it. I changed the way I chose to.

But there was still a lot more of me to change.

Some shifts started happening all at once, and others wouldn’t happen at all. I tried and failed and kept trying. And I screamed. When I couldn’t scream anymore, I concentrated on my throat as hard as I could, and then I howled.

Gret howled back. It wasn’t a howl of pain like mine was. It was strong and proud.

The edges of my rational thoughts began to fray. Frantically, I tensed again, and the pain increased tenfold. Gret whined and nudged me with her nose.

I bared my bloody, half-changed teeth and growled.

Gret moved in front of me. She was enormous, much bigger than I was. She growled back like a volcano awakening.

Good, I thought. She can kill me if she has to.

I let go one last time and became a wolf.

Chapter 29

Hours later — I had no idea how long — I lay panting on the floor, a girl again. My bones felt like they weighed a thousand pounds. I curled myself up and Gret sat behind me, her hand on my arm. The transformation back had been excruciating, as it always was, but Gret had wedged her shoulder beneath mine and transformed over and over, back and forth, showing me the path to a human body. Before that —

I caught my breath. There actually was a “before that.” The images and sounds were blurred, like the memories existed behind a dirty window. I thought as hard as I could, but there were still gaps of time that weren’t there at all. And yet — yes, most of it I could remember.

“You okay?” Gret asked.

I nodded, afraid to speak. The wolf’s memories felt so fragile; I didn’t want my voice to shatter them. Gret carefully lifted my head and stretched out her legs beneath it, so that when she set me down again, my ear and cheek rested on her thigh, sturdy and thick, just like the rest of her. I pressed my face into her skin and remembered.

After I’d finished becoming the wolf, I had stood and fallen immediately. The air around me felt so light and clean. My skin, though raw, was unburdened by toxic silver burns. I stood again, and the second time, I’d remained upright.

In every fragment of recollection, Gret’s body was next to mine. We couldn’t speak and I couldn’t think — could I? — but even through the strangeness of my memories, I knew that she’d been pleased. No, not pleased. That wasn’t a werewolf word. As a beast, Gret was – joyful.

Once I’d found my feet, I’d wandered up and down the hallway, sniffing at corners. Scents had brought up images of Sandra, Rosie, and Luc. I’d known them, somehow, though I had never noticed what the pack smelled like before. Then I’d turned to Gret and pressed my nose against her fur, inhaling the scent of her skin and the blood coursing beneath it. She had done the same to me.

Now, Gret’s palm, smooth once more, was warm against my skin. I stirred, and she squeezed my shoulder.

“You did good,” she said. “You did really, really good.”

She rubbed my back, her hand sliding over the knobs of my aching spine. I was dimly aware that I should have been more ashamed of my nakedness, but I was still bestial enough that I couldn’t quite remember why. I leaned into Gret’s touch. Adaptationist hands probed and pinched, looking for the variable they hadn’t accounted for. Nurses’ hands were gentler but efficient, businesslike. Gret’s hands were firm and kind.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” Gret said. Her voice was low and quiet, like receding thunder. “As soon as I got to the squat, I could tell you’d been by, and I knew what was gonna happen. I should’ve been ready for you.”

“You were taking care of the pack,” I said, my voice thin.

“At least you’re easy to track,” Gret muttered. “I guess that’s one thing that stupid cuff is good for.”

“What do you mean?”

Gret hesitated. “It’s easiest to track blood. And since you have that thing stabbing you every three hours, you just always — smell a little like blood.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not a bad thing,” Gret insisted, though I couldn’t see how. “At least I was still wolf enough to find you.”

“Wolf enough?”

“I don’t really transform much anymore. I usually do it when everyone else is at the park, on the days I don’t come with.”

“Why?”

“I mean, the others know what I am, but it’s still kind of a lot for them to have a wolf wandering around their house.”

“No,” I said. “Why do you transform at all?”

I knew that she could feel my heartbeat begin to race again. After seeing her as a wolf, I almost knew the answer to that question, but I didn’t have the words to explain.

“I just do,” Gret said after a while. “I can’t not. I need to do it like I need to eat or sleep, just less often. It’s the way I have to live.”

I had always thought that my body would be healed if the transformations stopped, but now I wondered. Did I need to transform to live, too?

“Transforming by yourself sucks, though,” Gret said. “You’re supposed to have a pack.” She paused. “You know that wolves were once as widespread as people were? They reached all corners of the world first. Anywhere we went, wolves were already waiting for us.”

I nodded. Dr. Topher had told me many times. “What part of the world are your ancestors from?”

Gret laughed softly and said, “Pick one. Everywhere has werewolves. We find each other. My dad was standard, though. My mom isn’t sure what his exact background was.”

“Really?” Everyone who’d had a hand in raising me classified people into as many categories as possible. I hadn’t realized that some people didn’t.

“Yeah, well, the impression I got was that my parents’ ‘relationship’ wasn’t really about talking so much,” Gret said. I could practically hear the eye roll in her voice. I blushed. “Anyway, my pack had people from all over. America’s always pretended to be a melting pot, but that’s obviously bullshit. Just look at how much the Western Europeans are still in charge of everything here.”

“You sound like Rosie.”

“Well, Rosie’s a smart kid. Anyway, werewolf packs are the real melting pots — or would be if that weren’t such a dumbass term. But the stories my mom told me — the stories that the pack members of her bloodline had passed down for ages — were mostly about the Wusun and the Dacians.”

“Oh.” I didn’t want to admit that I’d never heard either of those names before, but Gret seemed to guess.

“They’re old,” she said. “Swallowed up by other cultures and countries ages and ages ago. Some standards say that nonstandards live too much in the past.” I felt her shrug. “Maybe they’ve got a point. But my mom just said that werewolves have long memories.”

“What are the stories like?”

“The Dacians were all about werewolf warriors. New protectors would stay transformed for up to a year to be initiated, and then after that, they were considered to be bonded in solidarity forever. Standard soldiers wore wolf masks and skins to be more like them. The Wusun, though, they considered us straight-up saviors. They have a legend that says a wolf mother saved their abandoned standard king when he was a baby. The Wusun weren’t the only ones with stories like that. Of course, now everyone says they’re just dumb myths.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Somehow the idea of a werewolf taking in strays seems pretty realistic to me.”

Gret squeezed my arm. I bit my lip to keep from smiling too obviously against her leg. I’d never be so bold if not for my post-transformation exhaustion; for the first time in my life, I was glad my defenses were down.

Gret asked, “Have you ever seen a true wolf? In person, I mean?”

“When would I have done that?”

“You’ve been to a city. They have zoos in cities.”

“The lawyers did not take us to the zoo.”

Gret huffed and slid her hands under my hair to massage my shoulders. “Werewolf is a standard word. Everyone always tries to mash both the human and the wolf side into one term. Or they use language about the transformation itself: shifter, changer, stuff like that. But with each other, we just call ourselves wolves.”

“But you’re human, too,” I said, suppressing a shiver.

“Well, yeah,” Gret said dryly. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be using words at all, would we? But, you know, we adapted ourselves to be like wolves, so why keep insisting we were different from them?” She shrugged again. “That probably mattered more back in the day. I mean, I’ve never seen a true wolf, either.”

“There aren’t many left,” I said.

“No. Just us now.”

I shook my head. Gret’s hands stilled.

Haltingly, she said, “I never told you I was sorry. About what I said in that alley. I shouldn’t have —”

“You were right. I looked at my file. No one knows what Dr. Topher did to make me like this, but it was more than just — they said if she tried to make me a normal werewolf, she might’ve actually succeeded. But she didn’t stop there. I don’t know what I am, but it’s not a werewolf.”

Gret didn’t speak for a long moment, but then she said, “That doesn’t matter.”

“How can it not —”

“I can’t explain it. It’s just stuff I know, that you shouldknow, but no one ever … look, everyone talks up the whole armed adaptation thing, but just now, when we were transformed, we weren’t fighting, were we?”

I sifted through the new memories. I’d been feral, but the wolf had somehow known not to be angry with Gret. I hadn’t known it could even be anything other than angry.

“You didn’t attack me,” Gret went on. “Even if that’s what Topher wanted you to do, and even if your head goes all weird when you transform, you’re still …” I waited while she searched for the end of that sentence. “You’re more of a werewolf than she knew how to make.”

“What if I have attacked people?” I whispered.

“What do you mean?”

I tried to tell her, but the words congealed in my throat like blood. They clogged my airway until I replaced them with a different confession.

“Before the transformation, on my way home, I saw Mr. Tremont. I don’t know what came over me, but I followed him.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t think that far! I was such an idiot … he went to Dr. Joyan’s house, and then he stopped me, and they both saw my hands. If he knows what that means, then he knows what I am. Gret, I’m so sorry.”

Gret was silent for a long time. Finally, she said, “That’s probably pretty bad.”

She didn’t seem angry or upset. She just sounded kind of numb.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “It was so stupid of me.”

“Yeah,” Gret agreed. “Why’d you do it?”

“I don’t know. I saw him and I thought about everything that’s happened to you guys because of him and … I couldn’t stop myself.”

I expected Gret to dump my head off her lap, but after a second, she resumed rubbing my shoulders.

“Well, there you go,” she sighed. “Protecting your pack.”

“I didn’t protect anybody! I made things worse!”

“Probably, yeah. I mean, at least you didn’t hurt him, but … ah, fuck. Someone should’ve taught you how to be what you are. I mean, we can do a lot of damage, you know? That’s why we have packs. They teach us how to balance things. EP was so shitty at raising you, and I’ll be an awful teacher. I mean, my pack was — but I’ll try to help. If you let me.” She paused. “You know, I didn’t think you’d transform so soon after I met you, but I was super relieved when you did.”

“Relieved?”

“It meant you cared what happened to you, no matter what you said. We transform to protect ourselves, too, not just each other. That was when I knew I was wrong. You are a werewolf. You want to survive. But you don’t have to do all the protecting anymore. The pack’s got your back. And now I know you’ve got ours.”

“I might have just ruined everything by having your back,” I said.

“Look, Millie … I don’t know what happens next, but I’ll be forsaken if I let this pack go down for good,” Gret said, her voice vibrating through my bones. “We will find a way out of this. Together.”

I couldn’t speak. Goosebumps rose on my arms. Gret stirred beneath me.

“I’ll get you that blanket again,” she said.

I slid my head off of her leg. After a moment, the blanket landed on top of me. Slowly, I wrapped it around myself and sat up, my head pounding. There were some pretty big rips in the fabric, which for some reason made me giggle, even though laughing just made my head hurt worse.

“Sorry for the property damage,” I said.

“Just another reason armed nonstandards must be regulated. No blanket in America is safe,” Gret said, her voice dry as the desert air.

It wasn’t even that funny, but my laughter turned hysterical in a matter of seconds. My newly reknit ribs protested, but I couldn’t contain myself. Gret sat back down beside me. When I finally caught my breath, hiccupping, she was half holding me up, her arm around my shoulders. She’d put her boxers and tank top back on when she’d gotten up to get the blanket.

Gret turned my face towards hers. All of her stoniness had melted away; she sat open and defenseless before me. I looked into her eyes and thought I saw a question there. I was just imagining it, though. Wanting impossible things.

Wasn’t I?

In answer to the question I hoped Gret was asking, I nodded. She took my face in her hands and kissed me.