Chapter 3 Fragile, They Say

Brie’s POV

Mabel finds me while I am icing my ribs with a cloth soaked in stream water, before the swelling's had the decency to show up.

"You're not coming to drills today," she says. It isn't a question. Mabel already knows I was going to lie my way out of it.

"I'm fine."

"You said that yesterday too, when half your face was on the ground."

I don’t have a comeback for that, but I go to drills anyway, because missing them draws more attention than going does, and attention is the one thing I genuinely cannot afford this week. The omega quarters empty out together most mornings, all of us filing down the same narrow corridor past the same row of shared washbasins, the same six bunks to a room, with the same understanding that privacy is a thing higher-ranked wolves get and we borrow in small, stolen pieces. A curtain half-drawn, a turned back, the unspoken agreement not to watch someone change. It’s not a hard life by the pack’s standards. It’s just a small one, drawn tight around the edges, and I’ve spent nineteen years learning exactly how much of myself fits inside it.

The training instructor calls formations, weapons drawn, four lines deep, the dull, repetitive clack of practice blades meeting practice blades over and over until the sound stops being a sound and starts being a texture under my skin. We drill the same three parry sequences every morning, until our bodies know them better than our minds do, blunted steel against blunted steel, the smell of oiled leather and crushed grass and forty-three bodies’ worth of sweat all folding together into something I have no name for except too much. Within ten minutes, the world does the thing it always does when there are this many bodies moving, shouting, and clashing at once. It gets too loud, too bright, every sound landing somewhere two registers too sharp, until I can feel my own pulse behind my eyes like a second, smaller heartbeat that’s somehow worse than the first one.

I drop my stance half a second late on a parry I should’ve made easily. Forty-three wolves running drills, and somehow the only person who claps eyes on it is Tansy, two rows over, smirking like I’ve handed her a gift.

“Careful,” she says, not quietly enough. “Wouldn’t want the fragile little omega to faint.”

A few people laugh. Not many. Most of them are too busy not looking at me, which by now I’ve stopped being surprised by and started simply filing under the weather. It happens, nothing special; you dress for it.

What none of them say out loud, but what everyone in this yard understands without needing it explained, is that helping me costs something. Marlena’s mother sits on the matron’s council. Tansy’s intended is a Beta’s second cousin. There’s a whole map of connections running underneath every drill, every meal, every shared bunk, and I sit at the bottom corner of it with nothing attached to my name except a moon-phase and a place. Stepping in for me risks whoever Marlena’s mother decides to mention it to next. I used to think the others were cowards. I’ve since learned that cowardice and arithmetic look identical from the ground.

I catch myself doing something strange near the end of drills: slipping between two larger wolves to retrieve a dropped blade, and neither so much as glances my way, even though I pass close enough to touch sleeves. It isn’t the first time. I’ve never thought much of it before; it’s always been easier to go unnoticed than not. Today, for half a second, it feels less like a habit and more like something already there, waiting for me to need it.

Underneath the clatter of blades, for just a second, something else surfaces: cold air with no light in it, a smell like wet stone, the specific silence of a no-moon sky, with no moon in it to make any noise. I don’t have a memory to attach it to. I was weeks old. But my body seems to remember the shape of that night even if my mind never got to keep it, and it hands the feeling back to me unannounced, like a debt I didn’t know I owed. It never lasts longer than a breath or two. By the time I’ve blinked it away, I’ve already missed the next parry, and the world is loud again in the ordinary way, which feels like a mercy and a punishment at once.

What none of them know, what I don’t even have words for yet, not really, is that the world isn’t too loud and too bright because I’m weak. It’s too loud and too bright because something in me hears, sees, and feels every part of it at full volume, all the time, with no dial to turn it down. I learned a long time ago there’s no use explaining that to anyone. Fragile is a story they already like. Nobody wants the corrected version.

Mabel falls into step with me on the walk back, the way she has since I was maybe eight years old and she decided, for reasons she’s never fully explained, that I was worth the risk of being seen with. I asked her once, years ago, why she bothered. She told me she’d had a daughter once who didn’t survive a hard winter and that some days it was easier to have somewhere to put the leftover mothering than carry it around with nowhere to set it down. She’s never said it again after that, and I never asked her to.

“You’ve got that look,” she says.

“What look?”

“The one where you’ve decided something happened that didn’t happen.” She doesn’t push when I don’t answer. She just walks, close enough that her shoulder brushes mine on the narrow path, which is the only kind of comfort I let anyone offer me. Accidental, deniable, easy to pretend isn’t comfort at all.

It’s near the council hall that I hear it. I’m not trying to listen, that’s the thing nobody understands about my ears: I don’t get a choice about what comes in. Alpha Dexter’s voice, low, through a window that’s open maybe two inches.

“...candidates for Damien. The girl from yesterday’s incident has come up more than once.”

I don’t hear the rest. Mabel pulls me forward by the elbow before I can stand there working out whether I imagined it, and I let her, because my legs have started doing something independent of the rest of me, something close to running.

Breeder candidates.

I don’t know yet what that phrase is going to cost me. I just know, the way I know a storm is coming before the sky changes, that yesterday's incident wasn’t the end of anything.

It was the beginning, and somewhere underneath my ribs, in the same place that’s still bruised from Marlena’s knuckles, the erratic beating of my heart doesn’t stop for a long time after.