Chapter 599

The afternoon had settled into the specific comfortable chaos of a pack rediscovering itself.

I could hear it from the lab – the link was not something you could turn off once it was active, not fully, n when two hundred and fourteen wolves were using it with the enthusiastic abandon of people who’d boch without it for three years and had a great deal of accumulated things to say. The muted version I was maintaining for my own presence in the link was not the same as silence. It was more like holding a door partially closed while a very loud party continued on the other side.

The party was mostly wonderful.

Someone had broken another bench. I’d heard about this through the link in the specific way that bad news about your botanical work traveled when the link was active – not one person telling you but approximately forty people telling you simultaneously, all with slightly different details, creating a composite account that was comprehensive if somewhat inconsistent.

The bench had been stone. It was now in three pieces rather than two. The person responsible was unnamed in the link – a strategic omission that suggested pack loyalty to whoever had done it – but the descriptions of the specific cracking sound were vivid and unnecessary.

I added bench replacement to the list of things that needed addressing after everything else.

The list was long.

I was writing it down, because I was writing everything down, because that was what I did now in the quiet spaces when the specific urgency that had been driving me for three weeks was still present and the specific thing I was working toward was closer than it had been and every written–down thing was a thing that would

exist after.

The four–year–old was the best part of the link today.

His name was Ben and he was four years old and he had absolutely no idea how to tune his thoughts out of the broadcast channel, and the pack had collectively decided to say nothing about this because what was happening was too extraordinary to interrupt.

Ben had wanted cookies.

e relationship with reality. He

ters and his mother had said not

This was his primary thought, his organizing principle, his curr wanted the cookies that were on the kitchen counter in his fam before dinner and the specific injustice of this was being broadcase… real time to two hundred and fourteen wolves who were all very aware of the cookie situation and had opinions.

*The cookies,* Ben thought, in the link, at the volume of a child who had not yet learned that thoughts were private. They are right there. She cannot see me from here. If I am very quiet-*

*Ben,* several people thought back, involuntarily, and then immediately tried to not think it because thinking it was the same as saying it and saying it would warn him and then the cookie situation would not resolve and everyone wanted it to resolve.

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Cropter 599

She is in the other room. Ben thought. “If I am very small-

The link held approximately forty wolves in varying states of suppressed response. Someone – I suspected Edna- had the specific quality of someone who was enjoying this more than was strictly appropinate and was not helping.

*The cookies are chocolate, Ben thought. “My favourite.”

The link made a sound that was the collective equivalent of forty adults trying not to react to a four–year- old’s heist planning.

*I will take two. Ben thought. She will not notice two.

*She will notice two, approximately thirty wolves thought, and immediately tried to unthink it.

*She never notices two, Ben thought. He had apparently convinced himself. The decision was being made in real time through the link. “I will be very fast. Like a wolf. I am a wolf now. Wolves are fast.”

BEN,” his mother thought, from the other room.

A pause.

“Yes? Ben thought, in the specific innocent register of a four–year–old who had absolutely been doing nothing.

“I can hear you in the link. his mother thought.

A long pause.

*The cookies are for after dinner.” his mother thought.

*I was not- Ben started.

*Ben.*

*I was looking at them,” Ben thought. “I was not touching.”

*You were planning, his mother thought.

*Wolves plan,” Ben thought. It is a wolf skill.*

The link lost it.

I was in the lab and I lost it.

The specific laugh that arrived when something was so precisely itself that there was no other response – I sat at the desk with the compound notes and the documentation and the specific weight of the past three weeks and I laughed at Ben’s wolf skills and the cookies and the forty adults trying not to intervene in a child’s heist.

Ivy was warm.

She’d been warm since the shift, which was its own complicated thing, the wolf’s presence after three years

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hapter 59

of suppression arriving with all the suppressed feelings still in her and a great deal to say about them. Id been managing Ivy since the shift with the specific discipline of someone who’d had years of practice at

raging the parts of herself that wanted things she’d decided not to have.

Ivy had opinions about the management.

*You shut down the link, she said. “The monent we shifted.*

“Yes,” I said.

“Kael would have felt-*

“I know what Kael would have felt,” I said. *That’s why I shut it down.”

*You’re very good at hiding things,* Ivy said.

*Thank you, I said.

*It wasn’t a compliment, she said.

“I know. I said.

I was back in human form, in the lab, with the documentation and the compound notes, which was where I’d intended to be after the morning’s events. The morning had been – the morning had been extraordinary, genuinely, in the specific way of things that were exactly right and cost something to be exactly right. The pack with their wolves. The link active and full and Ben and his cookies and the bench situation and the pond and the specific ordinary wonderful chaos of two hundred people rediscovering something they’d lost.

I was going to hold that.

I was going to keep that in the specific place where I kept the things I was taking with me.

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19:18 Sat, Sep 12

Male In My Mate’s Worst Enemy