Chapter 4
1538 Words
I did not sleep that night.
Every time I closed my eyes I saw the physician's note. Keep as low-rank labour. May be useful when bloodline activates.
Seven words that described my entire existence in this pack.
I had thought I was surviving. I had been inventory.
By the time grey light started pressing through the tunnel entrance, I had worked through the anger and arrived somewhere colder on the other side of it. Colder was better. Colder could be aimed.
Sable was already awake, cross-legged on her sleeping mat, watching me.
"You have been thinking for six hours," she said.
"I had a lot to think about."
"What did you decide?"
I pulled up the System panel. Turned it so its readout faced me squarely.
[29 DAYS, 02 HOURS REMAINING.]
[NEXT QUEST: SECOND AND THIRD ROGUE KILLS]
[RANKED CHALLENGE: 1 DELTA-RANKED WOLF — COMBAT REQUIRED]
[DELTA RANK ADVANCEMENT: PENDING COMPLETION OF ABOVE]
"I decided we need to move faster than Lucas does," I said. "He thinks I am broken and bleeding somewhere in the forest. He does not know about the System. That window closes the moment I start winning publicly."
"Then we use the window," Sable said. No hesitation. No argument.
I looked at her. "You do not have to be part of this. What I am walking into is not small."
She met my eyes. "I know exactly what it is. I have been watching this pack take from the wolves beneath it for three years." A pause. "I am part of this."
Something shifted in my chest. Not the rejection bond. Something different. Something that had no name yet.
I filed it. Focused on the plan.
---
We relocated that morning.
The tunnel was compromised — Sable had let its location slip once, during a difficult period, to someone she had trusted. That trust had an expiry date now that Lucas's bounty was active.
She did not make excuses for it. Just said: "I told someone. I should not have. We move."
I respected that more than an apology would have earned.
The new base was a derelict barn three kilometres east of Velthar's outer wall. Sable knew it. Dry roof, intact walls, no pack scent markings anywhere nearby. Nobody had thought it worth claiming.
We were there before noon.
While Sable rebuilt the supply layout, I reviewed the System's intelligence on Lucas's curse. The numbers had been sitting in the back of my mind since Chapter Three, and I needed to face them cleanly.
[LUCAS STORM — CURSE DETERIORATION — REVISED TIMELINE]
[ONSET: 14 MONTHS AGO. CURRENT STATUS: ACCELERATING.]
[WITHOUT HYBRID ESSENCE: 7.5 MONTHS REMAINING.]
[TRANSLATION: HIS CLOCK AND YOURS ARE RUNNING IN THE SAME DIRECTION.]
Seven and a half months for him. Twenty-nine days for me.
He needed me alive, which explained the bounty's condition — unharmed, intact. He could not harvest a broken resource.
But I was not a resource. And I was done being treated like one.
---
We went back into packhouse territory at midday.
Sable knew the blind spots. I knew how to be invisible. Together we moved through the east wing without a single ranked wolf looking twice at us.
I was looking for the challenge board.
It was still there — the old noticeboard near the east entrance, covered in pack announcements. I had read it every day for three years while mopping the floor beneath it. Today it had something new.
My bounty. Posted in the common corridor where every rank could see it.
Alive only. Unharmed. Delta rank fast-track plus five hundred gold.
Lucas had just offered every desperate Omega in the building a way out of the bottom of the hierarchy.
Including, possibly, the ones who knew about the tunnel.
I memorised the notice and kept walking.
"We have a problem," I told Sable when we were clear.
"The tunnel," she said. She had already worked it out. "Anyone who knew about it now has a reason to talk."
"We already moved. But they will start checking everything connected to either of us."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Then we need to move faster than they can map us."
"Yes."
She looked at me with an expression I was beginning to recognise — the particular focus she got when she had already thought three moves ahead and was waiting to see if I had caught up.
"The north corridor," she said. "Two kilometres from the outer wall. Rogues drift through every few nights. Pack stopped clearing it six months ago."
"Good hunting ground," I said.
"Good hunting ground," she confirmed.
I looked at the packhouse towers above the Velthar roofline. At the orange glow that never went out. At the building that had kept me for nineteen years like livestock waiting for slaughter.
Twenty-nine days.
I was going to use all of them.
The System pulsed with a new notification just as we reached the outer wall boundary.
[PACK BOND NETWORK — INTERCEPTED COMMUNICATION]
[LUCAS STORM TO INNER COUNCIL — CLASSIFIED:]
['HE IS NOT TO BE HARMED. BRING HIM BACK INTACT.']
[SYSTEM NOTE: HE IS PROTECTING HIS ASSET.]
[OR SOMETHING ELSE. INSUFFICIENT DATA.]
I read the last line twice.
He needed me alive. That much was clear.
But the System's uncertainty — or something else — lodged in a corner of my mind and refused to leave.
I did not have time for questions I could not answer. Not yet.
What I had time for was the north corridor. Two more rogue kills. A Delta challenge.
One step at a time. Every step forward was a step Lucas could not take back.
- Writer
