To: HFL Leaders, Midwest and Northwest chapters

Proceed with third stage of the land reclamation project.

—NS

CHAPTER 28

Firesday, Juin 22

Hope stared at the sheet full of drawings and felt her stomach roll.

No. No, no, no! She’d had a happy day yesterday sketching the Wolf pups and juveniles. She’d drawn her friends as they napped and played and chased one another. Why, today, had she drawn them looking like this?

She tore the page in half, then in half again, before shoving the pieces under her bed. This wasn’t a vision drawing. It wasn’t! Her friends were whole and healthy! They weren’t missing limbs. They weren’t trying to crawl away from danger with their heads bashed to pulp. They weren’t lying in a field burned beyond recognition.

“It’s a bad drawing.” Hope sprang to her feet, intending to leave the cabin, to get away from the pencils and pastels and paper that told lies. “Won’t be real. Can’t be real.”

She reached for the door but didn’t touch the knob.

She hadn’t seen the reason for these drawings. If it was a vision drawing, she still didn’t know why the young Wolves might look like that. Would the next drawing give her the answers? Would it give Jackson and Grace what they needed to know in order to save the pack?

Turning away from the door, Hope settled on the floor with her large sketchpad and closed her eyes.

What is going to happen to the Wolves?

She opened her eyes and stared at the drawer in the desk, craving the euphoria that came from using the razor. Instead, she picked up a pencil and let the vision sweep her away as her hands drew the answer to her question.

CHAPTER 29

Firesday, Juin 22

Annoyed and oddly out of sorts, Meg gathered the prophecy cards that were scattered all over the sorting room floor. “Darn it, Sam,” she muttered. “I told you these cards weren’t playthings.”

He’d been curious about them. Of course he was. Wolf pups were curious about everything. But she’d told him these cards were special. And she knew that Simon and Henry had talked to the pup, explaining that these special cards were tools for visions. Like the razor. Something potentially dangerous. Not something for pups to play with.

And now the cards felt odd, off, filmed in a way she couldn’t explain.

She spread the cards over the surface of the big table, backs facing up. Each deck had a distinctive design on the back, so it would be easy enough to sort the cards into their proper decks. But she didn’t try to restore order. Instead, she touched the cards, and as she shuffled them around the table, a suspicion rose in her.

Sam wouldn’t play with something that belonged to her. But what about Lizzy, Sarah, and Robert? The back door of the Liaison’s Office wasn’t locked when she was working. Pete Denby had an office on the second floor, and Sarah and Robert sometimes played up there when Eve Denby needed some child-free time. And Lizzy spent a lot of time around the Market Square playing with Sarah and Robert.

Unlike the terra indigene young, who alternated between being interested in everything around them and napping to rest their little brains, human children quickly became bored with what they could have and whined to have the next thing they saw. At least, it sounded like they were always pestering their parents for “this,” and if they couldn’t have “this,” then they wanted “that.” If they’d been told they weren’t supposed to do something, it seemed that was the very thing they just had to do.

And they had been told they couldn’t play with the prophecy cards.

Maybe those things were normal for a human child. Having been raised in a compound where she had lived a very regimented life, she didn’t have any experience with “normal” when it came to children. She couldn’t tell the difference between youthful exuberance and misbehavior that would make the Others angry and cause trouble for all the humans. She’d made a mistake when Lizzy first came to the Courtyard, and the consequences of that had left her feeling anxious about everything the children did.

When she wasn’t feeling so out of sorts, she would talk to Ruth, who had taught school, or Eve Denby, who was a mother, and get some guidelines so she would know when the anxiety justified a cut and when it should be dismissed as normal. She’d like to feel as easy around the children as she did around the Wolf pups, whose games were a lot more rough-and-tumble but didn’t make her afraid.

Which brought her back to the prophecy cards someone had dropped on the floor.

Meg braced her hands on the table. Had she locked the door when she’d left for her midday break? Had Jenni, who had a key to the back door of the Liaison’s Office, come in to pick up the mail for Sparkles and Junk and forgotten to lock the door on her way out? Had the children, bored with themselves and their available toys, tried the door and, finding it open, come inside to poke around? And finding the cards, had they decided to play a game, and then dropped the cards when they lost interest—or heard something that reminded them they weren’t supposed to be in the Liaison’s Office in the first place? Nathan would know. If she asked, he could sniff around the room and tell her exactly who had been there. But that would get the children in trouble.

Meg stared at the cards and realized two designs were missing. She rushed to the drawer where she’d kept the decks. The nature deck was still there in the back of the drawer. She pulled it out, removed the cards from their box, and shuffled them in with all the others scattered over the table.