Chapter 93: Everybody Came Down Off The Fight Except The Mole

The drill horn went off the next morning like nothing had opened a hole in the yard the day before.

That was how the academy did it.

The ground knit shut, the classes ran on top of it, and the only people who knew what was underneath were the six of them and a mole.

Soren watched the rest of them come down over breakfast.

Maren ate three trays and complained about the walk across the grounds and stole the eggs off Soren’s plate, which was Maren coming down.

Selah read at the corner table with the frost on her knuckles back to the faint daytime pattern, which was Selah coming down.

Troy went to the training yard and ran drills on the patched grass like he was daring it to open again.

The pack was settling.

He could feel it on the map, four lines that had stopped grinding against each other now that they each knew where they stood.

The order he’d set was holding, and holding meant the noise went down.

The noise going down meant he could finally hear the one thing that was wrong.

Mona hadn’t come down.

She should have. She was the easiest of all of them.

Warm corner, close to his frequency, a steady supply of things to walk into.

By every read he had, Mona at rest was a mole asleep against a radiator.

She wasn’t asleep against the radiator.

She was at the warm corner, in the spot, but she kept getting up and pressing her back against the warm pipe and getting up again, like the warm wasn’t reaching the place it needed to reach.

The cold patch where the arm had touched her sat under her fur and didn’t take heat.

He’d checked it twice.

It read fine on the bond and it stayed cold to the hand, and Mona either didn’t notice it or couldn’t tell him, and Pack Sense looked right past it.

He didn’t have a way to look at the thing.

That was the problem.

The cold spot was real and his best instrument said it wasn’t there.

He was sitting on the floor with his back to the bed and his hand on Mona’s cold patch, getting the same nothing he’d gotten the last two times, when the moth came in through the gap in the window.

Dani’s moth.

Mona’s whole body turned toward it the way she turned toward anything she could almost see.

Dani came in a minute behind it, the way she always did.

She’d been doing that since the cavern.

She lit the room she walked into and then she walked into it.

Soren had a theory she did it so she’d know what she was walking into before she got there, and he’d never asked.

She didn’t say anything about the fight.

She hadn’t been in the box yesterday. .

Then she stopped reading the room and read the mole.

"What’s wrong with her back?" Dani asked.

Soren looked up. "You can see it."

"The moth can." Dani came two steps closer.

"Everything in here has a warmth to it. You, the wolf, the ice one, all of it reads warm through the moth, that’s what the moth does, it reads what’s alive."

She crouched, careful, at arm’s length from Mona, and the moth drifted down over the mole’s back.

"She’s got a hole in hers like a piece of her that doesn’t read alive and it’s not dead either, it’s just... not there."

She’d said more in a row than Soren had heard her say in a month.

"The thing under the yard touched her," Soren said.

"Going down. It put a hand on her the way it put a hand on the ground."

Dani didn’t pull back.

"It left something," she said. "Or it took something, I can’t tell which from here. The moth reads it as a gap."

She looked at the cold patch a while longer, the moth holding pale over it.

"I’ve got the others logged, warmth signatures, how they move, what changes when you change. I never logged her, she’s new."

"You log all of us?"

"Somebody has to know what you all look like when you’re fine," Dani said, "so somebody knows when you’re not."

She said to the mole, not to him. "Nobody logs the person holding the log, that’s just how it works."

Soren filed it.

He didn’t do anything with it yet, because there was a cold spot on a mole’s back that hadn’t been there two days ago and that was the thing in front of him.

But he filed the other thing too, the off-hand fact Dani had dropped and walked past, the one she clearly didn’t expect anyone to pick up.

Nobody logs the person holding the log.

◆◆◆◆

Mona pressed her back to the warm pipe again and got the same nothing she’d been getting all morning and made a small unhappy "augh" at it.

"I know," Soren said.

Dani stayed.

That was new.

She usually documented and drifted back out through the moth before anyone could turn the attention around on her.

This time she sat down on the floor a careful distance away with the moth over Mona’s back, watching the cold spot to see if it grew, and she stayed.

[DING! — Bonded observer (Dani): sustained proximity logged. Obsession Index: 1 → 2/60.]

Soren read it and didn’t say anything about it.

Two was not a big number.

It was the first time it had moved in a long time, and it had moved because Dani had decided, on her own, to sit in a room and stay instead of leaving through the window.

The moth held its pale light over the cold place on Mona’s back.

Dani watched it.

Soren kept his hand where it was.

Outside the drill horn had stopped and the yard had gone quiet over the thing that was waiting.

And inside the small room three of them sat with a problem none of them could fix yet, which was, he was starting to think, just what the pack did now when it wasn’t fighting.