Chapter7
1253 Words
I sign up for track tryouts because my body has become a problem.
This is not a new problem — my body has been a problem since the Verification, since the bond broke and something in my wolf went sideways and my senses started doing things that are not on the newly-manifested spectrum.
The enhanced hearing I can manage.
The emotional smell-reading is more complicated.
What I cannot manage is the energy — the restless voltage that runs through me and the sense that my muscles are recalibrating to a load they haven’t been given yet and are unhappy about waiting.
I need to run.
I have always needed to run — it is the one thing that has always quieted my insides— but right now, I need it in a way I haven’t before.
Like my body has been upgraded without my knowledge and is now running a system that requires more bandwidth than my previous routine provides.
Track tryouts are Wednesday afternoon. I put my name on the sheet. I just need the outlet, and track is individual enough that I can be unremarkable in it if I want to. Run a safe time. Blend into the pack of candidates. Go home.
This is the plan.
The plan lasts two hundred meters.
Coach Marsh runs tryouts the way she apparently runs everything — without preamble, without the performative warmth some coaches use to make new athletes feel managed.
She has a clipboard and a stopwatch and the ease of someone who has done this for twenty years and has stopped pretending it’s more complex than it is.
She lines up the candidates, records their names, sets the timer.
“200 meter sprint. Lane assignment by number. Go when I say go.”
I am in lane four. The girl on my left has the easy, confident look of a returning varsity runner. She’s already stretching in the way that means she knows exactly what her body needs before a run.
The girl on my right is new, like me, with the demeanor of someone who came to tryouts because a friend suggested it and is now reconsidering.
“Go.”
I run.
This is where the plan ends.
I know the moment I take my first stride that something is different, the distinction mattering in a way I’m only beginning to understand.
My stride is longer than it should be.
My turnover is faster.
The two hundred meters feels shorter than two hundred meters, the distance contracting around a pace that I’m not choosing consciously, my body finding a gear I didn’t know I had and settling into it like it was always there and I simply hadn’t pushed to it before.
I hit the line.
I slow down.
I put my hands on my knees and breathe, and my breathing is harder than the distance warrants but not as hard as the pace should have made it, and I stand up and look at the track.
That was fast. I don’t know exactly how fast.
The girl from lane six is still running and she was running when I crossed, which means —
I look at Coach Marsh.
She is looking at her stopwatch.
She looks at it with the expression of a person cross-referencing data — looking at the stopwatch and then at me and then at the stopwatch again with her head slightly tilted, running a quiet recalculation.
She doesn’t say anything but writes something on her clipboard, clicks the stopwatch and moves to the next lane.
The tryout continues. I stretch at the edge of the track and I watch the other candidates.
I ran faster than I should have been able to.
I don’t know by exactly how much, but I know that the varsity girl from the lane beside me crossed the line approximately three seconds after I did, which is not a small gap over two hundred meters, and she was clearly not at her best.
This is new information about myself I file under: the expanding list of things my body is doing that were not on the pre-Verification model.
After the sprints, Coach runs the distance candidates through a mile.
I volunteer for the mile because I’m not ready to stop.
I run four laps at a pace that feels comfortable and I finish and I breathe and I look at the track and I think: that also felt fast.
Coach Marsh looks at her clipboard.
She looks at me.
Then looks at her clipboard again.
“Come back tomorrow.”
Nothing else.
No explanation, no context, no indication of what tomorrow means — tryback, extra evaluation, something else entirely.
She turns to the next candidate and I am dismissed, and I stand at the edge of the track for a moment with my hands on my hips looking at the back of her head.
I look at her collar.
At the lapel of her dark track jacket, Westfield Athletics, standard issue, there is a small, silver, round pin.
A small emblem in the center that I can’t fully make out from this distance but which has a shape I recognize.
Like something you read once in a book and didn’t consciously retain but remains somewhere in the back of your mind.
I have seen that shape before.
I pick up my bag, go to the locker room, shower and change and go back out through the school’s main corridor.
I pass the board where the track team photo from last season is pinned, and I look at it.
Coach Marsh in the back row. The jacket. The pin on the lapel, visible even in a small photograph.
I stop.
I know what that shape is.
It’s from the forum post, three years ago, when I was fifteen and still new enough to Ashvale to be reading everything I could about pack governance structures.
A post in the security subforum about the Silver Council’s field observer network — the people they embed in pack-adjacent spaces to monitor bloodline and political activity.
The post had included a photograph of the observer insignia.
The badge they wear, standard issue, small and designed to be unnoticeable unless you know what you’re looking for.
Silver. Round. The emblem in the center.
I look at Coach Marsh’s lapel in the team photograph.
I look at the empty hallway.
I pick up my bag and run home.
I think about it the entire walk back.
She could be a pack affiliate who has the pin for a dozen reasons that have nothing to do with field observation.
Or I might be wrong.
I covered two hundred meters in twenty seconds in front of a track coach who was already in possession of that pin, and she told me to come back tomorrow, and I don’t know what that means but it’s not good.
I go home.
I add Coach Marsh to my journal with a question mark.
And the pin description.
I look at what I’ve written.
I have been at this school for less than a month.
I have a Vael wolf in my English class who knows my blood type. I have a boy leaving genealogy records on my desk.
And now I have a track coach with a Silver Council pin and a stopwatch that made her look at me twice.
I close the journal.
The city is full of people who know what I am.
I need to know what I am first.
- Writer
