Hunted by the Shadow Division

Chapter 10

T7 POV

She had not planned to follow him.

That was the first thing she would have said, if anyone had asked her to explain herself, which nobody ever did because nobody at the Division asked questions. Questions were for the research side. For the ones in white coats who spoke about her like she was a variable and not a person.

T7 did not think of herself as a person most of the time. She thought of herself as a function. A very effective one. She had been trained since birth to think this way. It was, Captain Miles had told her repeatedly over the years, the most efficient way to operate.

She had been efficient every day of her captivity without exception, until a Tuesday in autumn when she followed a stranger home from an alley because something inside her that had never spoken before suddenly would not be quiet.

The smell of him had reached her first. She had been moving through the city on an information-gathering exercise, tracking a secondary target the Division had flagged two weeks prior, when the wind changed and brought something to her that stopped every thought in her head as completely as a hand pressed over a flame.

It was not a smell she had words for.

She had words for useful smells. Threat-level smells. Target identification smells. Chemical signatures that told her what a subject had eaten, where they had been, whether they were afraid. These were tools.

This was not a tool.

This was something that the training had not accounted for because the Division did not believe she was capable of it. They had decided, in their careful measured way, that the psychological components that governed pair bonding in wolves had been sufficiently suppressed in the programme subjects. They had put it in a report with a lot of numbers attached. T7 had read the report once during a file audit and had thought, with the dry detachment she applied to most things, that they were probably right.

They were not right.

She had spotted him from the alley entrance and opened her eyes fully so he could see her, not as a provocation but because something in her needed him to know she was there. The pull she felt was enormous and disorienting. She did not have a name for it either, only the sensation of it, which was like being asked a question she had no language to answer.

He had looked at her for a long moment.

And then something had happened on his face. A change. A closing. And he had turned and walked away with the particular determination of someone who has decided something and will not undecide it.

She had meant to let him go.

She had meant to file the sensation under Anomalous Response: Investigation Pending and return to her primary objective.

Instead she followed him.

She stayed well back, further than her training usually required because something about closing the distance felt important in a way that made her move more slowly than she otherwise would. She watched him turn onto his street. Watched him unlock a door with the particular movement of someone who has unlocked that door ten thousand times. Watched a light come on in the window.

She stood across the street for a long time.

The house was ordinary. A two-storey in a residential street, well-maintained without being showy. Window boxes on the upper floor with something green and tenacious growing in them despite the season. A light on in the kitchen. Another on the upper floor, moving — he was walking through rooms, she noted, which meant he was restless. Which meant he had felt the pull too and did not know what to do with it.

Good. She was glad she was not the only one.

She missed her 19:00 check-in.

Then her 21:00.

She had never missed a check-in before. Not once in eleven years of operation. The Division monitored their assets with the thoroughness of people who knew exactly what they had built and how much it had cost them, and T7 had always understood that compliance was not optional. Not because she feared punishment, though punishment was real and swift. But because compliance was the shape of her existence. It was the container she lived inside. Without it she did not know what form she would take.

The upper floor light went off. The kitchen light stayed on.

She stood in the shadow of a large oak tree on the opposite footpath and watched the lit window and felt the pull like a tide and thought, for the first time in as long as she could remember, that she wanted something.

Not a directive. Not an objective. Not a successful mission completion.

Something of her own.

She did not know what to do with that.

She had never wanted anything before. Not food beyond fuel, not rest beyond recovery, not company beyond the operational necessity of it. The Division had not built wanting into her. They had built efficiency. Capability. Obedience.

They had not, apparently, built enough of the last one.

So she stayed where she was and she watched the window and she tried to work out what this feeling was and why it had arrived now after so many years of its absence, and she was so occupied with this problem that she did not immediately register that she had missed a third check-in.

Back at the Division facility, in a room full of screens and the quiet hum of servers, a light had turned red on a monitoring board.

Dr. Mortem had been notified.

The clock, though T7 did not yet know it, had started.