Page 9 of A Wolf's Revenge

“You stopped,” I said. “Which means you like it, even if you won’t say so.”

She looked at me for another second. Then she turned and kept walking.

I fell into step beside her. “Zimife Zorander. Everyone calls me Z. You’re going to be my tutor for the rest of the term.”

“I don’t remember agreeing to that.”

“Principal Adams will explain the details. It counts toward your scholarship application — he was very persuasive on the subject.” I paused. “Or I was. One of us.”

She stopped walking. She turned to face me with the full weight of her attention, which was, I discovered, a more substantial thing than I had anticipated. “You went to Principal Adams before speaking to me.”

“I needed to make sure the infrastructure was in place before the negotiation.”

“That’s not how you treat a person,” she said. “That’s how you treat a problem.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I had not expected to need one. I stood in the corridor of St. Jude’s with all my prepared lines arranged neatly in my head, none of them applicable, and Kerra Conti looked at me with those moss-green eyes and waited.

“You’re right,” I said. Because there was nothing else to say. “I apologize.”

She studied me for a moment longer, assessing, and I had the uncomfortable sensation of being read accurately. Then she said, “I’ll think about the tutoring,” and walked away.

I stood there watching her go and felt something I didn’t have a name for yet. Something that hadn’t been in any of my preparations.

My wolf was still on its feet. It did not sit back down for a long time.

I was late to my first class. I didn’t notice until the end of it.

She agreed to tutor me ten days later, after she had spoken to Principal Adams herself and confirmed the terms, plus negotiated two additional conditions I hadn’t anticipated. She was methodical. She prepared for every session in advance and expected the same from me, which no one in my life had ever done, and which I found I couldn’t refuse.

The tutoring was a mechanism. I had not forgotten that.

In the first month, I cataloged everything useful — the rhythms of her schedule, the routes she took, the names she mentioned, and the things she let slip about home. She was careful in general but she relaxed in increments, the way people do when they decide someone is safe, and I was very good at being safe. I had been trained to be. I told myself the way my wolf settled whenever she came into a room was concentration, the focus of a man doing his work well, and I filed every detail, reported back to my father’s network, and told myself this was all it was.

By the second month, I had stopped filing.

It happened without announcement. We were in the school library on a Thursday evening, the last ones there, and she was explaining something about tidal locking — the reason the moon always shows the same face to the earth, the far side permanently turned away, permanently dark — and she said, almost to herself: “I think about that a lot. What it would mean to have a whole side of yourself that no one ever sees.” And then she looked at me with an expression that was not guarded at all, that was entirely open, and said, “Do you have that?”

I said yes before I could stop myself. Because it was true. Because I had two faces I kept turned away from the world — the wolf, which my father had taught me to hide from the human half of the city as a matter of survival, and the thing I was doing to her, which I was hiding from everyone, including myself — and she had described the exact shape of me without knowing she’d done it.

She nodded, as if I’d confirmed something she’d already suspected, and went back to the textbook.

I sat across from her in that empty library and understood that I was in serious trouble.

By spring, we had stopped pretending the tutoring was the point.

Saturday evenings we went to the Hayden Planetarium — her idea, offered once, tentatively, as if she expected me to refuse. I didn’t. I had never been interested in astronomy but Kerra in that building was a different person than Kerra anywhere else; every guard she kept in place the rest of the week came down under that dome, and I would have sat through anything to see it. And under that dome, in the dark, beside her, the part of me that never rested — the wolf my father had built to stay perpetually on watch — went quiet. It happened nowhere else and with no one else. I did not let myself examine it.

She would tilt her head back at the projection and talk. Not to me, exactly — to the room, to the darkness, to whatever it was in her that needed the expanse above her to feel like the right size. She talked about deep time, about the distances between stars that made human lifetimes meaningless, about the way light leaving a dying star could still be traveling for a thousand years after the source was gone.

Her favorite theory was the multiverse. She explained it to me three times over three different Saturdays because I kept asking questions, not because I didn’t understand it but because I wanted to hear how she talked about it — the way her voice changed when she described a universe in which every choice branched into a new version of reality, every decision spawning an infinite number of selves, each living out the consequence of the road not taken.

“So somewhere,” I said, the third time, “there’s a version of me who made every wrong choice.”

“Every possible choice,” she corrected. “Right and wrong are your categories, not the multiverse’s.”

“What’s the multiverse’s category?”

“Consequence,” she said simply, and looked back up at the dome.