The door clicked shut on the red of Yara’s eyes and Soren was already moving, past Selah, past Maren sitting up with the play gone out of her, out into the dark hall after her.
He didn’t call her name.
Calling her name would’ve made it the pack’s business and it wasn’t the other girls business.
The hall was cold and empty in both directions.
She hadn’t gone far.
Yara didn’t flee, she withdrew, and there was a difference in the distance.
She was at the window at the end of the corridor with her back to him and her open eyes on the black courtyard.
"You knew before they did," Soren said.
"I’ve known for a while."
Soren stopped a few feet off.
"The channel," she said but didn’t turn around. "You thought it ran one direction. I know where you are. That’s what the Bureau filed, that’s what you assumed."
"It runs both."
"I feel you as a held note. The others feel you in the room, in the body. Maren feels your warm side, Selah feels you in the space she’s cold at, the mole runs her loop until she finds where you’re sitting."
"And you?"
"I’m the only one positioned to hear when the note goes flat."
Soren didn’t answer that.
Garrow had put words on it Soren had filed and never said out loud.
A worn coat, a season that felt like all the others right up until it was the last one. The bond drinks what the love pours in and the tamer pays the bill nobody hands him.
"How long?" soren asked.
"Since the mole’s shape held permanent." No count of days because Yara didn’t keep time in days, she kept it in events.
"The closeness started arriving daily around then every meal she comes early for, every lean into the signal. It lands on me through the channel because I’m the one holding the channel."
"That’s her getting closer."
"I know but..." Yara agreed. "Under it there’s the other thing."
She turned then, and put the red on him directly, which she saved for when she meant to be believed.
"The signal itself is getting thinner," she said. "Not you leaving because I’d know if you were leaving. You’re right there and there’s a degree of you that isn’t."
"You’ve been running interference."
It wasn’t a question and she didn’t treat it like one.
◆◆◆◆
She’d been the wolf under the door on the nights the closeness would’ve gone deeper.
Resettling between him and the small steady press when it climbed.
Not blocking Mona, never that, the mole girl’s homing was the one thing in the pack she wouldn’t touch.
Blocking the beat that would’ve cost him a measure he didn’t have to spare.
Rationing Soren without asking him.
"You don’t get to do that," Soren said.
"Someone has to." Her voice didn’t rise. "You won’t, you just decide it’s worth it, you pay. Every time you don’t tell one of us what it runs you. So I hold the channel and I count the degrees."
"That’s not your call."
"No, but It’s the only one I’ve got." She didn’t back off it. "Perception-channel only measures. It doesn’t hold, I feel every part of you that goes and I can’t keep one of them in place."
Her voice went quiet in the specific way when the one holding it had run out of air and won’t admit it yet.
Behind them, down the hall, the door to the room stayed shut.
The pack had heeded the wall in his voice. She was the one who hadn’t.
◆◆◆◆
Soren crossed the last of the distance and she let him, which was its own answer, because Yara moved out of range of things she didn’t want near her and she didn’t move.
"How thin?"
"I don’t have a number for it, It’s not a number I can read." The red stayed open, fixed on him. "A degree off the top of you every day the closeness arrives, but is small and has no edge. The kind of loss you’d never catch unless you were holding the string it comes off."
"But you catch it."
"I caught all of it. That’s what the channel gave me, not protection but a front-row seat."
Down the corridor a light was coming on somewhere, a floor monitor’s round, the academy’s night machinery turning over whether or not someone stood at a window losing the count of a boy she couldn’t hold.
Yara looked at the classification office wing at the far end of the hall, then back at him.
"There are five of us now," she said.
"Six if the elective one counts, and she costs you most, the choice ones cost most because there’s no thread to spread the weight."
"It’s going to be more. That review at the end of the hall means it’s going to be more. Girls I haven’t met yet, each one another degree, and you’ll take all of them because you always do."
She stepped in close enough that the cold came off the window between them.
"So I’ll ask you the thing I walked out of that room to ask where they couldn’t hear it."
Soren waited.
"Will there ever be enough of you to go around?"
But he didn’t have the answer.
He had a review flag at the end of the hall, a cost running quiet under a mole who’d never feel it.
A shadow goddess who could feel him thinning and couldn’t stop a degree of it, and a system that measured all of it and held none of it in place.
For the first time since the cut, Soren looked at a problem and couldn’t find the counter-move in it.
Then Soren reached out and gripped her shoulders.
He pulled her against him until there was no space left.
He kissed her.
It was hard and desperate. It was the only way to feel real and Yara pressed into him just as hard.