The cold patch on Mona’s back never finished fading and by morning she’d grown into it.

Soren woke before the others and found her sitting on the floor of the dorm with her knees pulled up and her lenses pushed onto the top of her head, looking at her own hands like she’d been handed someone else’s.

She had held a humanoid form only once before on the day she bonded. That shift had been fragile and exhausting. The sunlight was too bright and required lenses for eyes never meant for the surface.

This wasn’t that.

This time the form was steady. The gap Soren usually felt in his Pack Sense was gone. She felt like a complete person rather than a hole in the world.

"You are staying up," he said.

She looked at him.

"The form. You are holding it now. You could not do that before."

◆◆◆◆

Mona’s beast.

He recalled the details of her file.

The mole was the only bond that cost him nothing. She was bonded through a harmless circuit and served as the clumsy core of the pack.

Her entire vocabulary consisted of a single sound she made when she wanted to be near him.

The entity had touched her arm. It left a small patch that would not hold heat.

He originally thought it was a wound.

He had been wrong. The thing under the academy was a tamer and Mona was its match. When she returned from the depths the patch was not a injury. It was a missing piece she had reclaimed.

The half formed creature that once needed lenses and lost its shape when tired was only incomplete because it lacked the part now under her skin.

The mark didn’t break her.

It completed her.

He kept that thought to himself. He filed the information away with the other things he understood but was not ready to share.

◆◆◆◆

Humanity was entirely new to her.

She watched her fingers move with suspicion.

She touched the blanket and the floor to compare textures. When the first morning light appeared she flinched toward her lenses but then stopped.

The light did not burn and she looked at the window as if it had always lied to her.

"Easy," Soren said. "It’s allowed now."

She tried to speak but the sound was unfamiliar. It was a shape her mouth had never made.

"You do not have to talk. You have time to learn."

She tried again and got closer.

He did not help her further. A person learning to speak does not need someone finishing their thoughts.

He knew that what you pour into a bond is what the bond consumes so he gave her space. He let her find the words herself.

◆◆◆◆

She finally slept by the second night.

Beasts rested differently than people. The mole usually went dormant in the dirt. This was the first time her body required human sleep and she did not know where to go.

She tried the floor and the corner before circling the room to find a safe distance.

Then she found his frequency.

Soren felt her homing in on him.

Her pull toward his signal remained constant regardless of her form. She finished her loop at the side of his bed.

She sat against the wall with her shoulder against the mattress and her breathing slowed.

His frequency was the only thing that felt like home.

He looked down at her from the bed.

"There is a whole floor available," he said.

With her eyes shut she made a sound that almost resembled a word. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

He left her there.

◆◆◆◆

The change came with a cost during the night.

He felt a growing thinness like a worn coat. The system did not measure this because it was not a deepening bond. It was the bond consuming him.

Garrow had warned that this process has no signal before the end. You feel fine until the very last moment.

Mona’s form had stabilized.

The bond charged the master rather than the beast to pay for her stability.

He lay in the dark and calculated the price. A finished form and a closed door under the academy were worth the cost.

Watching her learn her own hands by his bed was worth it too.

Soren had already accepted this. When the lid failed he confirmed the bonds were real and chose them anyway.

He didn’t wake anyone.

He remained silent and did not wake the others.

He pulled the thin coat of himself a little tighter and watched the ceiling and let the mole girl sleep against the side of his bed, and the thing he’d told her was true. There was time to learn the word. He just wasn’t sure anymore how much of it the bond would leave him to spend.

◆◆◆◆

Yara found them at first light.

She came through the bond before she came through the door, the way she always did now, holding his location as a constant sense she didn’t have a protocol for.

The gray came in the window and didn’t burn anyone.

Mona was asleep against the bed with her cheek on the mattress and one new hand curled near Soren’s, and the cold patch on her back caught the light, almost gone, not gone, a person where a hole used to be.

Yara stood in the doorway with her red eyes open and went very still.

She’d gone still like this once before.

At the marker, when the third voice wrote line three in ink too dark for anything made in the last hundred years, the other hand, the one under the one he cut.

She’d gone still and afraid and named it.

She wasn’t naming this.

Yara was looking at the patch on Mona’s back, and her eyes were open, teary, and reading something off the sleeping girl that Soren couldn’t see from the bed.

"Master," Yara said.

Her voice was very even.

"What touched her down there," she said. "I know it."