Chapter 3 The Silence Inside Me

Rosalind's POV

I wake up with grass between my toes and no memory of leaving my bed.

For a second I just lie there, staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of it. My feet are dirty. My sheets are kicked halfway off the mattress. And there's a taste in my mouth like cold air and rain, like I've been outside for hours instead of asleep.

I sit up too fast, and my head spins.

"Please tell me I didn't sleepwalk," I whisper to the empty room, but nobody answers, because there's nobody here to answer. My father's already gone to the pack offices. My mother stopped checking on me years ago. It's just me, and dirty feet, and a memory with a hole punched straight through the middle of it.

I don't have time to figure it out. Marlowe's waiting.

She's already stretching by the old training field when I get there, the one behind the school that nobody uses this early except us. Dawn light everywhere, gray and thin. My breath fogs in front of my face.

"You look terrible," Marlowe says, which is her way of saying good morning.

"Thanks."

"I mean it. You look like you didn't sleep at all."

I almost tell her about the grass on my feet. I open my mouth to do it. Then I think about how it'll sound. I don't remember leaving my room, Marlowe. I think I was outside all night, and I don't know why, and I close my mouth again instead. Some things sound crazy even to the person saying them.

"Let's just start," I say.

This is our routine. Has been for weeks. Marlowe stands a few feet back while I try to force the shift, try to find whatever door is supposed to open inside me and let the wolf out. Every other senior in this school did it by accident the first time, some instinct just taking over. Mine has never once answered. Not out of fear, not out of anger, not even three nights ago when I nearly got hit by a car in the school parking lot, and my whole body screamed to change, and nothing happened.

I close my eyes. I picture what Marlowe describes, heat behind the ribs, teeth aching, skin too tight. I reach for it the way you reach for a word stuck on the tip of your tongue.

Nothing.

Not even close to nothing. Not even a flicker. It's like reaching into an empty room and expecting to find someone standing there.

"Try again," Marlowe says, gentler now.

I try again. And again. By the fifth time, my hands are shaking, and my eyes are stinging, and I hate how much this hurts every single time, how it never gets easier to fail at the one thing every wolf is supposed to just know how to do.

"Nothing," I say, out loud this time, because saying it feels like ripping off a bandage. "There's nothing there, Marlowe. It's not hiding. It's not scared. It's just not there."

Marlowe doesn't try to fix it with a hug or a pep talk, which is one of the reasons I love her. She just sits down in the wet grass next to me and says, "Two days till the Trial."

"I know."

"You could get hurt out there if nothing comes."

"I know that too."

Neither of us says the rest of it out loud: what happens to wolves who fail the Trial, what the Combine does with people who can't prove they're strong enough to matter. We don't have to say it. It sits between us like a stone neither of us can lift.

By the time I walk into the school building, I'm running late, and my hair's still damp, and I'm not paying attention to anything except getting to homeroom before the bell. That's why I almost walk straight into Percival Danforth at the corner by the trophy case.

"Careful," he says, catching my shoulder before I collide with him. His hand drops fast, polite, nothing pushy about it. That's the strange thing about Percival: everyone says he's ambitious, cutthroat, the kind of guy who smiles while he's planning your downfall. But right now his face just looks tired, almost worried.

"Sorry," I mutter, stepping back. "Wasn't looking."

"You never are." It's not mean, the way he says it. Just true. "Heard about yesterday. The collapse."

My stomach drops. "It's fine. I'm fine."

"I'm not asking if you're fine." He glances down the hallway, quick, like he's checking who's close enough to hear. Then he leans in slightly, voice low. "The Trial changes people, Rosalind. More than they tell you. More than they tell any of us."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means what it means." He straightens up, and just like that the strange softness in his face is gone, replaced by the smooth, easy smile he wears around everyone else. "Good luck out there. I mean that."

He walks off before I can ask anything else, leaving me standing by the trophy case with his words rattling around in my skull like a marble in a jar. The Trial changes people. More than they tell you.

I tell myself it's nothing. Percival likes games, likes secrets, likes watching people squirm. That's probably all this is, one more move in whatever game he's always playing.

But his words stick anyway, worse the longer the day goes on, worse every time I catch my reflection in a window and notice how tired my eyes look, how there's a faint gray smudge along my jaw that wasn't there yesterday, right over my scars, like a bruise blooming from the inside out.

It's not until last period, staring blankly at a chalkboard I'm not actually reading, that the memory finally cracks open.

I remember standing in the dark. I remember cold grass under bare feet and moonlight so bright it hurt to look at. I remember lifting my face to the sky and feeling something claw up from the bottom of my throat, raw and furious and three hundred years old, a sound tearing out of me that wasn't a scream and wasn't a cry.

It was a howl.

Except that's impossible, because I have never shifted once in my entire life, not last night, not ever, which means whatever howled in the dark behind our house last night wearing my voice wasn't my wolf at all.

It was something else entirely, and it's still inside me right now, waiting.