Chapter 3 Smoke and Silver

Ruth's office was the equipment shed, and she did not pretend otherwise. A workbench ran along one wall, covered in coils of rope and a broken chainsaw she had been meaning to fix since spring. She sat on an upturned crate with a mug of coffee in one hand and my contract in the other, and she read it slowly, with her mouth turned down.

"He put you on probation," she said.

"He put me on probation."

"Three months. And he wrote 'supervised jump status' in his own hand. Dex hates writing in his own hand." She looked up over the rim of her mug. Her hair was grey-white and cut short, and her hazel eyes had a way of landing on you like a hand on a shoulder. "You scared him."

"I didn't do anything."

"You jumped a line he didn't tell you to jump. That's enough to scare any Alpha." She set the contract down. "Sit. You're making the shed look untidy."

I sat on a crate across from her. The shed smelled of gas and leather and old smoke, and through the open door I could see the crew hauling hose up to the drying rack. Wren was out there in her soot-stained yellows, arguing with a sawyer twice her size.

"Here's the thing," Ruth said. "I hired you because I need a jumper and because your record is the best I've seen in nine years. I did not hire you because Dex needs a mate. He doesn't want one. You'd do well to remember that."

"I'm not looking for a mate."

"Good. Keep not looking." She tapped the contract. "You'll bunk in the east cabin with Wren and two of the sawyers. You eat at the mess. You don't go past the creek line without telling me, and you don't go near the pack house unless Dex says so. Those are my rules. Dex's rules are longer and stupider, and you'll learn them soon enough."

I nodded. Ruth's eyes dropped to my hands in my lap. I had them folded, and my sleeve had ridden up, and the mark on the inside of my wrist was showing. She looked at it for a long time.

"That's a funny burn," she said.

"Cookstove."

"Mm." She took another drink and did not look away from it. "Cookstoves usually leave a shape like a splash or a stripe. That one is a crescent with a line through the middle. You could set a compass to that curve."

I pulled my sleeve down. "Base has a lot of cookstoves."

Ruth set her mug down with a small click. "Ivy. I'm going to say one thing and then stop saying it. Whatever that is on your wrist, keep it covered until Marcus comes and goes. He's a man who notices things, and he has a long memory for old markings."

My stomach turned over. "Why would the council care about a burn?"

"Because the council cares about everything." She stood and handed me the contract and a set of keys on a wire ring. "East cabin. Bottom bunk. Wren snores."

I took the keys. One of them had a strip of red tape on it.

"Ruth. What happened to the last jumper?"

She was already turning back to her workbench. "What makes you think there was a last jumper?"

"The board on the wall. Four names, and one of them is scratched out."

Ruth picked up the broken chainsaw and set it down again without looking at me. "That name is scratched out because the jumper left. That's all. Go get your bunk before Wren takes the good one."

The east cabin had four bunks, one window and a woodstove somebody had painted blue for reasons no one could explain. Wren was already there, sitting cross-legged on the top bunk with a sock in her hand and her honey-brown hair loose down her back, and when I came in she threw the sock at me.

"Welcome to the palace," she said. "The stove works if you hit it. The shower works if you don't. Don't sit on the third bunk, the leg is broken and the last guy who did it is still complaining about his back."

I caught the sock and threw it back. "Which bunk is mine?"

"Bottom, by the window. I saved it because the sawyers snore like a logging truck and you look like a woman who needs her sleep." She hopped down and landed light on her feet. "Also because you jumped the south line and everybody's been talking about it all day. I want to hear the story."

"There's no story. I read the wind and I jumped."

"That's the whole story? That's boring. You're supposed to say something dramatic like 'the fire spoke to me.'"

"The fire doesn't speak. The smoke does. It tells you where it's going before it goes."

Wren laughed, loud and unguarded, and it made the cabin feel less like a shed with a stove in it. "I like you. You're weird. My brother hates weird."

"Your brother fired me."

"My brother fires everybody. He fired the last cook for burning the porridge. He fired a sawyer for leaving the gas cap off a can. He's got this idea that if he controls every little thing, nothing bad will happen to the pack." She shrugged. "It doesn't work. Bad things happen anyway."

I sat down on my bunk. The window above it looked out at the creek and the dark tree line and, beyond that, the pack house with its lights on.

"Wren. Cora's been Beta since before you were born?"

"Yeah. She was my father's Beta too." Wren's voice changed a little, and she picked up a boot and started lacing it. "She's loyal. She's just not very nice about it."

"She doesn't like me."

"She doesn't like anybody new. Give her a season and she'll come around, or she'll find a way to make you leave. It's a coin toss, honestly."

I looked out the window again. Cora stood at the corner of the pack house with her phone to her ear, her short black hair dark against the pale siding, nodding at whatever she was hearing. Then she turned her head, and her eyes found my window, and she looked at me for a long moment before she lowered the phone and walked into the trees.

The mark on my wrist flared hot. I hissed and pulled my sleeve up, and Wren turned around at the sound.

"What?"

"Nothing. The stove."

But it was not the stove. The mark was glowing, faintly, a thin line of silver light under my skin, and as I watched it brightened once and faded, as though something out in the dark had called to it and it had answered.

Wren was staring at my wrist. Her mouth was open.

"What is that?" she said.

"Nothing."

"That's not nothing. I've seen that before." She sat down slowly on the edge of the bunk across from me. "Not on a person. In a book. My father had a book."

The cabin door swung open. Cora stood in it with the last of the evening light behind her and her arms folded.

"Ruth wants you at the mess," she said to Wren. Her eyes slid to me. "Not you. You stay."

Wren looked from me to Cora and back. "Cora, she just got here. What's the problem?"

"The problem is that the council's man arrives in two days, and I have a jumper on this base with a strange mark and a stranger record, and no one in the pack has ever heard her name." Cora stepped inside and let the door swing shut. "So I'm going to ask you some questions, Ivy. This time you're going to give me real answers."

I stood up. The mark on my wrist was still warm under my sleeve.

"Ask them," I said.

Cora smiled, and I could not tell whether it was kindness or something colder. "Where were you born?" she said. "And who was your father?"

I opened my mouth to answer, and the door swung open again, and Dex stood in the doorway with his jaw set and his eyes on Cora and his voice low and hard.

"Leave her alone," he said. "She's mine to deal with."