Thunder would stay with Ena while the other two hunted. At night, he’d watch the sky. He knew exactly where the system’s phase-points were. Some were close enough to shimmer if he shifted his vision to the right part of the spectrum. But he never saw any signs.
He was growing. He could tell by how tight his clothes were getting. The boots were the first to go into the backpack. The shirt and jacket second. He made slits in his trousers, all the way up to his thighs.
Thirteen days later, Ena’s pups opened their eyes. A few days after that, they started to walk. One wandered close, and he picked it up and Ena didn’t growl or come take it away from him.
In another week they were playing, barking, and bringing the wolves so much joy that sometimes Andret’s heart ached with a different kind of hurt. He’d look away.
Still too human.
A week later, the pups nipped at his heels and Ena came up to cuddle with him. She licked the hand she’d bitten.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I heal fast.”
She kept licking.
“All right, all right, apology accepted.”
She huffed and nuzzled into his neck.
An odd kind of peace, of contentment, flowed through him.
“We have to keep moving, you know.”
Ena’s gaze settled on the mountains ahead of them as if she’d understood him.
The next night, he made a sling out of his jacket, and she let him place her pups in it. They headed toward the mountains.
* * *
—
Andret knelt on the shore of a still mountain lake, washing his face. Two winters had come and gone. The points of his ears had come in. He sported a dark beard and long, black hair. An animal pelt hugged his hips. He’d torn the straps off his backpack and made a belt to keep it in place.
The change wasn’t quite complete—he would be larger by the time it was over—but it had gone far enough that no one would mistake him for human.
Ena’s reflection joined his in the water’s surface. She leaned into him like she always did when given the opportunity.
Happy yips and growls in the distance told him that their pack was playing. They’d encountered no other wolves here. There was not enough game. But his pack had him, and he was a far better hunter. With him, the wolves took down larger prey than they could otherwise.
That night, lying under the stars, hands laced behind his head, he saw it—the shimmer of an activated phase-point. His layered irises had matured and extended far beyond a human’s visual spectrum. They allowed him to clearly see not only the phase-point but the small dot that came out of it—a ship. It was accelerating at speeds no human could survive, and it was headed for his planet, not merely passing through. It made several course corrections for a reentry that would take it to the site where he and Calyce had crashed. It might still have been a probe.
There was only one way to find out.
Ena, who’d been cuddling up against him and snoring, picked her head up, attuned as ever to his mood.
The time had come. He’d thought the hole in his soul, in his humanity, healed, or at least well scarred over. But now it tore anew.
He’d had two years to discover who and what he was. Two years to understand where the change was taking him. He was more predator than soldier. That part was still to come. And he yearned for it, dreamt about it. When the adult donai had come to the creche to take custody of the children, he’d seen what he would become, where he belonged. He still wanted to be with his own kind.
The creche staff, including the armored combat instructors who trained the children to fight and fly, feared the adult donai the most. Calyce had been the only human that didn’t fear them. He had to go to his own kind, to honor her last wish and sacrifice, to save the lives with which he’d been entrusted.
He