Mona did not get her answer that night.
Joan held it.
She was good at holding things, the only one of them with nothing in her chest to ding off, and she’d decided the question deserved a room, not a corner.
So the room happened the next evening, in the dorm, with the whole pack folded into it because Mona wouldn’t sit still until everyone she could see was somewhere she could see them.
"Why is everyone here," Maren said, flat on her stomach across the foot of the bed.
"Mona herded us," Selah said.
"Mona can’t herd. "
"She used it on you twice. You’re here."
Maren had no answer to that. She put her face in the blanket.
◆◆◆◆
Joan sat against the wall with Mona in front of her, cross-legged, lenses up, waiting.
"You asked me something," Joan said.
"Augh."
"Whether it’s wrong. To want him only for yourself." Joan said it plain, no softening.
"I’m going to answer it where everyone can hear, because everyone in this room wants the same thing and it’ll save us all having the conversation six times."
"I don’t want him only for myself," Selah said.
Everyone looked at her.
"I want him mostly for myself," Selah said. "It’s different. There’s nuance."
"There’s no nuance," Maren said into the blanket.
"There’s some nuance."
Soren let it run. He’d learned that the fastest way through a room like this was to be the wall it bounced off, not another voice in it.
He sat on his half of the bed and waited for Joan, who was the only one here building toward an actual point.
◆◆◆◆
"None of you wants to share him," Joan said.
"Correct," said Maren, the blanket.
"Every one of you," Joan said. Her eyes moved across each of them and stopped nowhere. "Goddess, ice, fox, mole. Every one of you would take all of him and leave the rest nothing, if wanting made it so."
"Also correct," Selah said. "Go on. This is the nicest thing anyone’s said about me all week."
"That’s the part nobody wants to hear." Joan didn’t smile.
"You don’t share because you’re kind. You share because you chose to, and you keep choosing it every day you don’t drag him into a corner and keep him there."
The room got quieter.
Mona’s lenses didn’t move off Joan.
"Wanting him to yourself isn’t wrong," Joan said, to Mona, finally landing it. "It’s just the easy part. Everyone in here did it on the first day. The choosing not to is the thing that costs."
◆◆◆◆
"You’d know," Maren said.
It came up from the blanket without heat, but it had a point on it, and Joan turned to take it square.
"Say it."
"You don’t have a thread." Maren propped her chin on her arms. "No bond. No beast. No little number floating over your head when you do something. You walked in on a Tuesday and decided to stay and that was the whole bond. So yeah. You’d know about choosing. You’re the only one of us who didn’t get pulled."
"Maren," Soren said.
"It’s fine." Joan held up a hand. "She’s right. That’s exactly why it’s me explaining it."
She looked around the room, at Yara still at the edge with her red eyes catching the light, the frost gone soft on Selah’s knuckles, the fox ears that wouldn’t tuck, the cold patch under Mona’s sleeve.
"Every one of you has something holding you here besides yourself," Joan said. "A bond. A circuit. A fusion. Something the system can point at and say there, that’s why she stays. If you ever stopped choosing him, the thing would still be there arguing your case."
She put her hand flat on the floor.
"I don’t have the thing," she said.
"There’s nothing in me holding me here but the part of me that decided to. If I stop choosing him, I just leave. Nothing pulls me back. Nothing dings. I walk out and the system doesn’t even notice I’m gone, because it never had me written down."
Nobody said anything.
"That’s not sad," Joan said, before anyone could decide it was.
"It’s the cleanest love in this room and you all know it. I’m the control group. I’m what’s left when you take the wiring out."
◆◆◆◆
Soren felt it land in his chest before he understood why.
The control group. The love with the wiring taken out.
That was the whole shape of the thing he’d been carrying since the dark, the math he ran every night and didn’t like the answer to.
A homing circuit cost him nothing. Wiring did what wiring did, free.
The day Mona’s wiring went slack and she stayed anyway, she’d become what Joan already was. A choice with no circuit under it.
And a choice drank from the well the wiring never touched.
Joan had been spending him this whole time quietly, since the first Tuesday.
The only one whose every single day cost him something because not one second of her was automatic.
He’d never run her number because she didn’t have one.
He ran it now, sitting on the bed, and the floor of him sat low to let him.
"You’ve been costing me the most this whole time," he said. "Haven’t you."
Joan looked at him.
The only one in the room he had no thread to read, so he had to read her face, and her face said she’d known it longer than he had.
"Somebody had to be honest about it," Joan said.
◆◆◆◆
"Wait." Selah sat up. "What does that mean. Costing him."
"It means what it means," Joan said.
"No. You said costing. He went quiet. You both went quiet." Selah’s frost climbed off her knuckles and stopped, held. "What is the choosing costing him, Joan."
Soren said nothing. That was its own answer and Selah heard it.
Maren had come off the blanket and was sitting up too, ears forward now, all the play gone out of her.
"Soren," Maren said.
"Drop it."
"You drop it. What’s it costing you."
"I said drop it."
He said it low, flat, the wall going hard, the voice he used for the things he meant. The room knew that voice and usually heeded it.
The room heeded it.
One of them didn’t.
◆◆◆◆
Yara hadn’t said a word the whole time.
She’d been at the edge, where she always was, half in the dark, the red of her open eyes the only part of her that caught the light.
She’d listened to all of it. The choosing. The wiring. The well.
The control group.
Soren felt her understand it a half-second before the others had, felt it move through the one bond in the room that ran deepest and oldest and cost the most.
She’d crossed the old wall.
She held his location as a constant sense. She’d know the shape of a thinning soul better than anyone here.
She stood up.
She didn’t slam anything. She didn’t speak. She didn’t look at him, which was worse than if she had.
Yara crossed the room, opened the door, and walked out into the dark hall, quiet, the red of her eyes the last of her to go.
The door clicked shut behind her.
The pack sat in the silence she left.
"That’s not anger," Selah said, low.
"No," Soren said.
He was already on his feet.
"It’s something worse"