Chapter 89: The Pack Has A Hierarchy Now And Apparently I’m Not At The Top Of It...

They came up into the gray light before the morning drill, six of them and a woman in a borrowed jacket who walked into the door frame.

The training yard was whole again.

Whatever had eaten the ground under it had put the surface back.

Soren stood on the grass they ran on every morning and did not tell anyone what was underneath it.

He had Mona by the elbow because she could not see and would not stop trying to walk toward the brightest thing, which up here was the sky, which she had never met.

She kept tilting the sunglasses up to look at it and making the unhappy noise and Soren kept tilting them back down.

"Augh," said Mona, mournful, at the sun.

"I know," Soren said. "It stays up there. You stay under that hood."

◆◆◆◆

The room was the same size it had always been.

That was the first real problem and it arrived before any of the bigger ones.

Z-class housing was a shared box with two narrow beds and a window that didn’t open all the way.

Soren and Selah split it.

Yara slept as the wolf, under the bed when she felt like a wolf, on top of it when she felt like more than that.

Maren had her own place across the grounds and came over.

Dani drifted in through the moth and out again.

There was no version of the floor plan that had a mole in it.

"She can’t stay here," Selah said, the second the door shut. "There’s no room."

"She lives underground," Soren said. "She doesn’t need the room, just the floor."

Mona, on cue, walked into the wall, apologized to it with a soft "augh," found the corner by the radiator, and folded down into it with her knees to her chest catching the one warm spot in the room.

She put her cheek against the warm pipe and went instantly asleep.

Selah looked at the mole.

"She found the warmest spot in four seconds," Selah said.

"She’s good at finding things in the dark."

"That’s my radiator."

"It’s the academy’s radiator."

Selah did not dignify that.

◆◆◆◆

Maren took it worse and louder.

"So she just gets to be here,"

Maren said, arriving through the door without knocking, which she never did, dropping onto the end of Soren’s bed.

"In the room with the radiator sleeping. While I have to walk across the entire grounds in the cold every single time I want to—"

She stopped.

"Want what?" Soren asked.

"See how the team’s doing," Maren said while blushing.

◆◆◆◆

Soren was ignoring the last DING from the cavern because there’d been a beast to clothe and a tunnel to climb.

But it was still sitting open in the corner of his sight, and it wasn’t the kind that went away.

[DING! — Pack Obsession aggregate has entered restructuring threshold. Hierarchy resolution required.]

He pulled the bond-lines up in his head and looked at them the way he’d look at a ledger that didn’t balance.

Four direct lines now.

Yara pinned at the top, sitting on the cap, 75 of 75, full, no room left to climb.

Selah at 68 and climbing on jealousy alone.

Maren at 57 and gaining for the same reason.

And under all three, brand new, a single thread at 1, the mole, who wanted nothing from him except to be near his frequency and stay warm.

Then Dani, off the side, 1 of 60, bonded through the moth and not through him, watching all of it from a distance and saying nothing.

The system had a word for what happened when you stacked four direct bonds with no order between them.

It called it unstructured.

[DING! — Multiple bonds without established dominance ordering. Resonance interference rising. Recommend hierarchy resolution before next bond event.]

"Recommend," Soren said out loud.

"What," said Selah.

"Nothing."

◆◆◆◆

Yara came out from under the bed.

She didn’t look at Selah or Maren.

She crossed the small floor and crouched down in front of the sleeping mole and looked at her for a long moment, breathing slow against the warm pipe.

"This one doesn’t want what we want," Yara said.

"No," Soren said.

"Then this one isn’t the problem." Yara stood back up and turned and put her eyes on him.

"The problem is you keep adding lines and you’ve never told any of us where she stands."

She didn’t mean Mona.

"You keep us level," Yara said.

"All of us the same, all the time, careful, fair. You think that keeps the peace."

She tilted her head, the small movement.

"It doesn’t. It just means none of us knows what she is to you, so all of us assume the worst, and the worst is each other."

Selah had gone very still on her bed.

Maren had stopped pretending to be casual.

"The thing under the ground knows there’s no order up here," Yara said. "Whatever decides who gets unmade, It looked right at the new line because the new line had no place."

"You don’t get to keep us flat anymore. You have to choose what we are to each other or it’ll choose for you."

The Quill, in the bag by the door, scratched once.

He read it now.

[ — she’s right, you know. ]

The Author was severed, gone, no longer writing.

This was the other one, the third voice, the one Yara had been afraid of since the night it first spoke. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

It had just agreed with her in handwriting that belonged to nothing he could name.

Soren set the Quill face down.

He looked at the four of them, the ice on the sill and the fire on his bed and the mole asleep in the warm corner who wanted nothing but to be close.

"Fine," he said. "We’ll sort the order."

Selah’s frost stopped, Maren sat up and Yara’s red eyes didn’t move off him.

"But not because the system told me to," Soren said, "and not because something under the yard wants to know. We do it because I’m deciding it."

Outside, the drill horn went off across the yard, and the surviving classes started filing out onto the grass to run on top of the thing that was waiting.

Mona woke up, looked at the wrong wall, and said, "Augh."