Hunted by the Shadow Division

Chapter 15

T7 woke at two in the morning.

I was still on the floor. Cass had fallen asleep in the armchair with a cup of tea she hadn't finished going cold on the side table. The house was quiet. Outside the street was empty, which I had confirmed three times since Miles left.

I heard the change in her breathing before she moved. Wolves surface from unconsciousness differently to humans. More cautious. More aware. She lay still for a full minute assessing her environment before she opened her eyes, which was exactly what I would have done.

She looked at the ceiling first. Then at the room. Then down at me on the floor.

We looked at each other in the dark.

"Why are you on the floor?" she said. Her voice was rough from the sedative.

"Someone took my couch."

She sat up slowly, carefully, like she was taking an inventory of herself to confirm everything was still attached. Her hand went briefly to her shoulder where the darts had hit and then away again.

"You caught me," she said. Not a question.

"You took three darts for me," I said. "We can call it even."

She looked at Cass sleeping in the armchair. Something moved across her face that she did not quite manage to suppress. It was not a look I had any context for. It was the look of someone encountering something they have no reference point for.

"She brought me a blanket," T7 said, very quietly.

"She does that."

T7 looked at the blanket in her lap for a moment.

"I need to tell you something," she said.

"OK."

"The organisation I work for. The Division. They were involved in the attack on the Blue River pack."

The room did not change. The dark did not change. Cass kept sleeping and the city kept its distant murmur and I sat on the floor and felt something cold move through me that was not entirely surprise.

"I know," I said.

She looked at me.

"Not the details," I said. "But I have always known that what happened to my pack was not a random rogue attack. The smell was wrong. I just did not know who or why until recently."

"They wanted strong bloodlines," T7 said. "They had been tracking your pack for two years before the attack. When they moved it was to collect specimens and to eliminate witnesses. Some wolves were taken. Most were killed." She paused. "I only learned this recently. From the files. They did not tell me — the programme subjects — where the original wolves came from. Where we came from." She looked at her hands. "I was born here. I have always been here. But the files showed me what was done to bring me into existence and I understood then what I was to them. Not a person. Not even an animal. A result."

The cold thing inside me got colder.

"You didn't know," I said.

"No."

I thought about my father's body in the grass. I thought about my mother's face in the last second.

I thought about this girl sitting on my couch with a blanket Cass had brought her, telling me the truth at two in the morning when she could have said nothing.

"Why are you telling me this?"

She was quiet for a moment. Choosing words with the care of someone who has not had much practice saying true things out loud.

"Because you deserve to know. And because I am not going back. I do not care what they send after me. I am done." She looked at her hands. "I have been a function for a very long time. I would like to try being something else."

Rhy shifted inside me. Not aggressively. The way he shifts when he wants me to pay attention to something.

"What's your name?" I asked. "Your actual name. Not T7."

She looked at me for a long time.

"I don't have one," she said.

"Then we'll find you one," I said. And I meant it.

She looked at me with an expression I could not fully read in the dark but that Rhy understood completely.

We sat in the quiet for a while. Not talking. Not needing to.

It was strange, sitting in the dark with someone whose existence I had spent four days trying not to think about. Strange in the way that some things are strange — not uncomfortable, just new. The particular newness of being in a room with someone and not needing the room to be anything other than what it was.

Rhy was awake but still. He did not push. He did not make demands. He simply sat with the fact of her the way you sit with something you have been waiting a long time to be near, carefully, so as not to startle it.

"The male wolf," I said eventually. "The one in the facility. The original one."

T7 looked at me.

"He is still alive," she said. It was not a question. She knew.

"Yes," I said.

She was quiet for a moment. Then: "I know about him. From the files." She did not say anything else. But something shifted in her face, briefly, before she put it away. Something that told me the files had contained more than operational information. That she had read things that explained her existence in ways that no person should have to read about their own existence.

I did not push. I would find out the rest in time.

At some point near dawn she stood up. She folded the blanket with a precision that was very obviously trained and set it neatly on the couch cushion. She moved to the door and stopped with her hand on the frame.

"The Division will come again," she said. "Not Miles. Miles is manageable. Mortem himself will come, and he will bring more. He wants you badly."

"I know."

"You should talk to your sister. The researcher."

I looked at her.

"I know who she is," T7 said. "I have read your file. Your sister may have resources that could help locate the facility."

She stepped through the door.

I did not call her back. I knew, with the certainty that Rhy had always carried and I had only just started learning to trust, that this was not the last time I would see her.

The bond told me so. Quietly. Without drama.

Like something that has already made up its mind.