“That day we were all doing research to locate the compound where I’d been kept, Heather was upset because her family was going to disown her if she continued to work at Howling Good Reads. I remember thinking, What will happen to Heather if she makes the wrong choice? I must have hit my hand at the same time I was thinking that because I had a vision about Heather. There were magazines scattered around her, covered in blood. I saw a date. Not the current issue.” She frowned. “Not even the current year. But what I saw had to be wrong. I must have mixed up the numbers.”
“Is that all you saw? Magazines scattered around Heather?”
“You sell some magazines at HGR, so I thought . . . There was so much blood, I thought it meant she was going to die in the store if she stayed.”
There hadn’t been many details about how Heather died, but the newspaper article hadn’t mentioned anything about magazines. Something else to ask Montgomery. And whether Meg mixed up a date hardly mattered now.
“Meg?” Simon moved until he was right next to her, then rested his forearms on the sorting table, matching her position. “Would that store have had magazines?”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“That store Heather was in. Would it have magazines?”
“I don’t know.” She had that look in her eyes that meant she was reviewing her training images to see if she could find a match. Then she shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Heather was a bunny,” he said gently. “She was nice for a human, and a good worker, but she was afraid of us in a way that Merri Lee and Ruthie aren’t. Vlad and I recognized the signs and knew she wasn’t going to stay much longer, even before the terra indigene leaders came here for that meeting. Even before you had that vision.”
“But if she had stayed a little longer . . .”
“She would have been driven out of her pack, and when she left HGR, maybe they wouldn’t have taken her back, and she would have been alone.”
“But alive.”
“Would she?” He touched her hand. “Maybe Heather did avoid the death you saw because she quit when she did. She was with her family, and that’s what she wanted. If they hadn’t gone to that store on that day, or if they had been delayed, or if Heather had decided to stay home and do some chores, she would have been reading about someone else who was killed in that attack. You can’t know about what you don’t see, Meg.”
Meg sighed. “You’re right. I couldn’t know. And I can’t make a cut to see what might happen every time a friend has to make a choice.”
“No, you can’t.” He ran a hand over her head and gave her a light scritch behind one ear. “You feeling better now?”
“A little.” She gave him a wry look. “Better enough that I won’t put another knot in Nathan’s tail.”
<I was concerned,> Nathan said from the front room.
<And rightly so,> Simon replied. <But Meg looks embarrassed, like a squirrel who fell out of a tree and is trying to pretend she intended to do that.>
With a huff of annoyance, Nathan went back to the Wolf bed.
“I’m fine,” Meg said. “I don’t want my friends to get hurt, and it’s hard knowing that what I saw wasn’t enough to save Heather when I was able to save the ponies and Sam. And maybe she did live longer than she would have if she’d continued working at HGR.”
And maybe she died much sooner, Simon thought.
CHAPTER 44
Firesday, Maius 18
Not only had Jackson returned her drawing of the Wolf song; he and Grace framed it and hung it in her room. They brought her more paper and more pencils in different colors. They spent time telling her that this shade of green was grass and that shade was tree that shed its leaves when Autumn walked the land and that shade was pine. They described, as best they could, the shades of water, but they knew water as shallow and sun warmed versus the coolness of a deep pool, not the color of the water.
She listened, soaking up what they said and wondering what was outside her room. Jackson and Grace weren’t the only Wolves here. She knew that from the song. But she wasn’t brave enough to ask if she could leave her room.
She thought about her new keepers. They refused to call her cs821. Once each day, they asked if she had chosen a name. They didn’t punish her for not choosing. They fed her, cleaned her clothes, made sure she had what she needed to wash herself and use the toilet. And they seemed pleased that she liked to draw.
Jackson and Grace. But as she thought of them, she didn’t see Grace. She saw Jackson and . . .
Taking a clean sheet of paper, the girl began to draw.
Jackson walked into the scarred girl’s room with a plate of food for the midday meal.
She sat at the head of the bed, her arms wrapped around tucked-up legs, her chin resting on her knees.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, only realizing how sharp he sounded when she winced. He set the plate on the desk and approached the bed, sniffing lightly so that she wouldn’t know he was trying to catch the scent of blood.
No blood, but something was wrong.
“I wanted to draw a picture for you and Grace, but I drew that.” She pointed to the paper at the end of the bed.
Holding it carefully by one corner, he turned it around. Then he sucked in a breath.
“Have you ever seen these places? Seen . . . images?” he asked.
She shook her head.
She’d never seen him in Wolf form, but she’d drawn his head, muzzle raised to the sky, the Rocky Mountains in the background. That filled the top left section of the paper. The bottom-right section was filled with the head of another howling Wolf. Filling the center of the paper was a human dwelling like nothing he would find around his home territory, an Eagle’s view of an island, and the thundering water known as Talulah Falls.
“That other Wolf isn’t Grace,” she said, sounding worried.
“No, it’s my friend Simon. He lives in Lakeside, a place on the eastern shore of Lake Etu.” He studied the girl. Her shaggy hair was a golden brown, and her eyes were green with flecks of gold. If she were a shifter, he’d think she belonged to the Panthergard with her coloring. “You drew this for me?”
She nodded. “It means something.” She looked at the desk, at the drawer where she kept the razor. Then she looked away.
“It means something,” he agreed. “A strong friendship always has meaning.”
She looked surprised, then relieved.
No, Jackson thought. I won’t ask you to use the razor.
He picked up the drawing, careful not to smudge it. “Thank you.” Then he saw the drawing under it.
“It confused me, so I didn’t finish the picture.” She hesitated, then added softly, “I used up a lot of my blue pencils.”
“I’ll go down to the Intuit village later today and see if they have more.”
There was power in the drawing she’d made of him and Simon, but this other one disturbed him. A wheat field. He knew it was wheat because she had drawn stalks with ripe grain in the foreground. But it was underwater. Sharks swam above the wheat field, and in the background, at the edge of the paper, was something that looked like a sunken ship.
He took that drawing too.
“Eat your food,” he said.
“Wheat doesn’t grow underwater. I remember that from the training images.” A glance at the drawer that held the razor.
“You don’t have to cut. You’ve given us answers. It’s up to us to figure out the questions.”
Jackson left the room and closed the door. Then he listened.
Soft footsteps crossing to the desk. A drawer opening.
He counted to ten before the drawer closed again and the chair scraped over the floor. When he was sure she was eating instead of using the razor, he silently stepped away.