Most of the time, the mess hall is a beast unto itself, alive with the stench of a hundred bodies, scraping bowls, the animal heat of too many wolves packed in too small a space. But punishment hour strips all that away. Now there’s only silence and the echo of my own movements, every sound doubled back at me by the empty walls.
I lose track of time. The only markers are the ache in my shoulders and the way my thoughts spiral, always coming back to the cold, the tracks in the snow this morning, the way Lyra’s eyes narrowed when she caught the scent of the intruder.
She’d told me to keep quiet, to blend in with the rest. But I can’t. Not really. My mind picks apart the memory like a bone: the unfamiliar scent, the depth of the prints, the certainty that what left them wasn’t just passing
