Page 13 of Fated, Allegedly

Erin stops at the gate with her hand on the post. I watch her look at the lit windows, at the children's boots lined up on a porch, at sixty years of my family living quietly on the far side of a line no human being has ever crossed. Then she steps over it.

9

ERIN

Iwake up in a bed that isn't mine, under a quilt with a pattern of pine trees stitched around the border, and for about three seconds I have no idea what has happened to my life.

Then my ribs report in, and my wrist, and the whole image comes back at once, the door in the hillside, the undercut bank, five steps out of cover and then a thing my eyes refused to comprehend. I lie still and stare at the ceiling boards and run the standard diagnostic. Head injury? No. Hypoxia? No. Ingested anything? Half a granola bar and creek water. Corroborating witnesses? Armed men, dogs, and a helicopter.

There's a glass of water on the nightstand, a folded change of clothes, and my field notebooks — all six of them, stacked oldest to newest, with the core samples lined up beside them in a plastic tray somebody sourced from a kitchen.

I sit up too fast, swear at my ribs, and go looking for the world.

The compound is a village. I expected bunkers, or a lodge, or something with a gate and a purpose when I got here. Past the porch are eleven or twelve houses set in a fold of shoreline, gardens, a woodlot, a shed with a tractor half-disassembled, and a clothesline strung with what is unmistakably a child's dinosaur pajamas.

Two boys are arguing about a soccer ball. An old woman is pruning something with total absorption. Somebody's frying bacon.

Grace finds me on the steps before I've made it any further. She's got silver hair over one shoulder and a mug in each hand, and she sits down beside me on the cold boards like she's known me for years, but hasn't.

"He's asleep," she says. "Finally. I put something in his tea that he pretended not to notice."

"How's the shoulder?"

"Closed. It'll be pink by tonight and gone by Sunday." She hands me a mug. "Ask the question you're actually holding."

I take a breath. "Rate?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Healing rate. Through-and-through soft tissue, closed in under twelve hours. That's not fast healing, that's a different metabolic reality." My voice is doing something unsteady, so I speed up. "Which implies caloric demand I can't account for, which implies a resting requirement that would be visible in any population study, which implies — how many calories, Grace? A day. Roughly."

Grace considers her tea. "Owen eats about four thousand and he's retired. Nash eats seven and he's insufferable about it."

"Seven thousand." I put my head in my hands. "That's a large-carnivore energy budget in a bipedal frame."

"Is that helping?"

"Enormously," I say, and mean it.

Owen comes down from the woodlot with sawdust on his sleeves and sits on the step below us two hours later, which I later understand is deliberate. He puts himself lower than me. He talks for an hour without once telling me I've had a shock.

He gives me the truth. Shifting is heritable, expressed at puberty, and doesn't skip; a child of two wolves is a wolf. Mixed pairings run about half. Gestation is human. Lifespan is human plus fifteen or twenty years, weighted toward the good end.

"You're giving me a pedigree study," I say.

"I'm giving you what you'd ask for." He shrugs. "You want the mystical version, Hazel does it better and she'll charge you a pot of tea."

"Why isn't there a fossil record? Why isn't there a genome record? People have sequenced wolves for thirty years, you can't hide a chromosome…"

"You could ask Grace to put a swab in a tube for you."

I stop. "What?"

"You've got kits in that duffel. Wyatt brought everything." Owen's blue eyes crinkle. "Nobody here's afraid of your microscope, Erin. We're afraid of what somebody with money would do with the answer. Those aren't the same fear."

I understand that I have just been handed the single most valuable biological sample of the century, freely.

Isla takes me around noon because, she says, everyone is going to stare anyway and it's less awful if there's structure.