The main program started at six and nobody told her where to stand so she picked a spot at the back left of the formation and stood in it and waited. The yard smelled of frost and the night's accumulated cold and underneath that, barely, the iron-salt smell of people who trained here every day until their bodies stopped distinguishing between effort and existence. The stone underfoot was gritty. She could feel it through the soles of her boots, the specific texture of it, ground down by years of the same drills in the same places until the stone itself had learned the pattern.
Eleven wolves in the main program. Twelve now, with her.
Nobody looked at her directly. Several of them looked at the space just beside her, which was its own skill, a practiced thing, the kind of social precision
