They made me to be quiet.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet, but the engineered absence of noise. I learned to move without sound, breathe without catching air, think without disturbing the stillness that the white rooms demanded. I understood numbers, pressure thresholds, angles of force, and the way a human skull responds to blunt impact. I knew the color code for door access, the cadence of a guard's shoes, and the taste of copper that followed when the needles went in.
I didn't know what "kind" felt like. I didn't know what hunger was beyond a chart on a clipboard, or fear beyond a heart-rate statistic. If I was anything, I was a function: Subject-09, viable asset, maintain compliance.
The first emotion I might have ever had came on the night the lights failed.
I didn't have a word for it. I only had a shape—something loosening in my chest as alarms shuddered through the corridors and a smeared red wash pulsed over white walls. Techs shouted. Doors sighed open with emergency protocols, and somewhere far away, a lift stalled, and someone cried for help. A little girl's voice. It was high and thin and breaking.
I didn't follow the voice. I followed the plan hammered into my bones.
Phase One: exit cell.
Phase Two: reach stairwell three.
Phase Three: vent shaft, thirty-three meters.
Phase Four: unknown.
Unknown was a word I liked. It didn't require anything of me.
A blackout should have triggered containment doors and a ring of stun-foam dispensers, but nothing answered. A test room's glass had spidered with cracks—someone had tried to break it from inside with a stool. I passed it, small and weightless, bare feet slapping only slightly on the tile. The air was colder than usual. My breath fogged and trailed me like a reluctant ghost.
In the transit corridor, a wall screen flickered and, briefly, showed me my own face in its garbled reflection: a girl with close-cropped black hair and eyes like wet coal, skin a little too pale beneath the hospital shirt, a faint line of scars laddering my right forearm where electrodes had kissed and burned. My face didn't look twelve. It didn't look any age. It looked unfinished.
I keyed the stairwell. Emergency-unlock accepted. The door groaned and gave, metal gritting metal. I slipped into a stairwell shaft that yawned up and down like a throat. Down was the plan. Down led to foundations, to backup generators, to a service tunnel that a night janitor had once mentioned while he thought I was sedated. Down smelled of wet concrete and old air.
But the sirens faltered, then cut altogether. In the sudden vacuum, the building sounded as if it were holding its breath.
When the light changed—when it changed color—that's when I turned my head.
The second-floor landing had an observation window into a chamber none of us were allowed to see. It wasn't on the maps they let me read. It shouldn't have existed. Yet there it was, sealing itself from the inside: slabs of black stone like pressed night, a ring of metal above it, fine-wired to a crown that hovered, trembling, over a chair. The air inside the chamber rippled, as if heat were rising inside a snowstorm.
Two technicians had fallen against the glass. A third pressed his hands flat, staring through me at something only he could see, pupils blown wide. His lips were shaping a prayer or a code. I didn't know which.
I should have kept going. I should have kept descending until the world grew quiet and damp and I could find the service grate. I should have waited there and listened for footsteps and then done all the things inside me that the tests had taught me how to do.
Instead, I stepped toward the glass.
Not because I was curious. Curiosity is an ache; I didn't have aches. Not because I was brave. Bravery is the difference between knowing fear and moving anyway; I had never known fear. I walked toward the window because the air tasted different—the metallic tang of a thunderstorm about to break over a summer field. I had never stood in a summer field, but I had watched the screen in a break room when no one was looking, and something in me knew the word "storm" belonged to this.
The crown above the chair spun. The metal ring writhed with small blue tongues of electricity, spitting and hissing. The black stones weren't black at all; they weren't any color I understood. When I tried to fix my gaze on them, my eyes watered. Somewhere, a generator surged, and the rail under my fingers vibrated like a plucked string.
"Subject—!" a voice barked, but the word died under a crack so loud it lifted me onto my toes.
Light tore. That's the best I have now. It didn't flash. It tore—a seam pop. The chamber's air pulled inward, and for one stuttering second the crown, the chair, the fallen techs, even the rippling of that wrong-colored stone all leaned as if toward a tide.
The window exploded.
I raised my arms without thinking. The afterimage of the tearing hung on my retinas like veins of white lightning. Shards sprinkled like hard rain and kissed my forearms and cheek with neat, stinging lines. Air punched me in the chest and shoved me backward through the stairwell door that had not had time to seal. I hit the landing, rolled, bone on concrete, hospital shirt twisting tight.
Then something caught me behind the heart and yanked.
It didn't come from the room. It came from beneath my ribs, like a thread tied to a piece of me I had never owned. It pulled, and my body bucked at the pull—an animal jerk. There were voices now, distant and close, overlapping. The building's voice—metal complaining, glass falling, water screaming in pipes. A child's voice crying Stop stop stop. Someone saying We're losing containment. My voice saying nothing at all.
The stairwell stretched.
Concrete passed like torn cloth. The rails blurred. I wasn't moving; the world was slipping past. When I tried to swallow, I swallowed the lightning. It ran down into me in white lines.
There was a smell, sweet and green and cold, like the dream of wet leaves. There were noises that weren't alarms: a hollow, fluting birdcall; wind combing through something tall; a creek arguing with stones.
Then there was the softest thing I had ever felt.
It was too soft to have a name. If I'd had words then, I would have said it felt like moss on a riverbank, or like a sleeping animal's fur breathing under my fingers. It surrounded me, and not like the white room's air. This softness had shape—cool shade lying across warm earth.
When I opened my eyes, light dappled me.
There were trees, impossibly tall, and their trunks were pale, almost silver, rising into a canopy that caught the sun and broke it into slow-moving coins. My cheek was against something springy. I lifted my face and a scatter of small ferns clung briefly to my skin and then fell. My body had weight. When I breathed, it was not the stinging chemical of sterilized halls, but green.
It should have felt like a dream. I had been trained to recognize artificial states. Induced experiences were a part of my test stack; the lab could forge rain and sunlight and the sound of the sea. They had never forged smell well. This wasn't lab air. It carried the faint odor of damp bark, rich soil, crushed leaves, and something else—faint sweetness, like distant smoke that wasn't trying to be smoke at all.
I rolled to my back.
Above me, the pale trees whispered. A strip of sky lay between their crowns, very blue and very far. I focused. I counted seconds between the sway and my breath. The numbers didn't calm me; they were simply what I knew.
My arms were wrong. I stared at them long enough that my vision blurred and cleared and blurred again. The skin was still pale, but not the same, not human. A fine nap of fur lay over the back of my hand, so faint it was more suggestion than hair. My fingers were slender and tapered more than I remembered, and when I flexed them, my nails flashed—narrow, slightly curved, not human nails at all.
I sat up too fast. The world lurched. The forest steadied it.
The wrongness didn't stop at my hands. It didn't stop at all. My ears—my ears were in the wrong place. I touched the side of my head. Felt only hair, longer than it had ever been in the lab, brushing my jaw like flossed silk. I raised my hands, careful now, and found them: two triangular shapes perched high, tracking the forest. When a bird called from the left, my left ear tipped to find it. When the creek spoke somewhere behind me, my ears journaled the sound and told me distance and direction.
I slapped my own ear. The sound it made was soft, like patting a cushion.
"I'm… alive," I said, and the word rolled on my tongue like a loose marble. I had not spoken in days, maybe weeks. The lab liked silence. It believed silence was the same as control.
A breeze combed the ferns and lifted the hair on my arms. Beneath my spine, something shifted—something that was not ground and not my back. I froze. The new limb froze with me. Very carefully, I rolled onto my side and looked behind me.
A tail lay along the forest floor, curled toward my hip like a question mark. It was thin and sleek, not fluffy, and it ended in a slightly lighter tip. When I thought stop, it stopped. When I thought move, it twitched, then lashed, plants whispering against it like surprised friends.
Not human, then. Not what I had been.
A thought slid across my mind: kitsune. I didn't know where it came from. Maybe a book in the lab's reading tests. Maybe a story a technician told over coffee. A fox spirit. Trickster. Illusion. Fire.
The word didn't sit wrong on me. It sat like a coat that might be mine one day.
A twig snapped.
I went still. The tail didn't. I had to tell it twice. The second time, it obeyed like a reluctant muscle.
Something approached through the ferns, low and steady. I watched the shrubs map its path—the little quiver, the bend, the rebound. I lowered myself so my body was a thin line against the ground, and I listened. Footfalls landed weight-heel-toe, not human. A scent came with them—wet stone, labrador fur, cold river. Wolf. My ears tipped forward of their own accord.
I had a plan for wolves. The lab liked plans. But the plan was a plan for the old world, for clean corridors and electric bars. This forest did not care about plans.
Branches parted in front of me and a wolf stopped on the far edge of the little clearing. It was limned in light. Gray along the back, pale on the belly, eyes like amber spills. It teased the air with its nose, ears pricking, tail held easy but alert. Its gaze slid past me, then slid back and caught. It cocked its head the way a curious dog will when a sound puzzles it.
I considered the distance. I considered its mass. I considered the angle of its front leg, the way its shoulders were set, the way its mouth was not quite closed, showing a hint of tongue. Calculations lined up like lit beads.
Then the wolf wagged its tail.
Just the tip, uncertain.
"Hey," a voice said from behind the wolf, and the wolf's ears flicked back—not afraid, acknowledging. "You found something?"
Branches flurried. A girl stepped through into the light.
She wasn't what I expected. I didn't know what I expected, and I didn't have a word for the way my chest felt when I saw her, a small thump and then a slow, strange wideness. She was my height, maybe a little taller, which made sense because I was small. Her hair was messy-short in a way that made it look like it had been cut with a knife and then a river. She wore a tunic the color of fresh moss and trousers tucked into boots that had seen more work than polish. A satchel rode her hip. A strip of cloth was tied around her forearm, stained green like it had been used to bind a plant rather than a wound.
She carried the smell that had whispered around the clearing before—the sweet smoke that was not smoke. It clung to her like a story she had told too often to hide. Under it lay the scent of wolf, of leaves, of sun-warmed skin.
Her eyes were a brown that the lab lights never made: warm, with light inside them. When she saw me—when her gaze landed on my ears and my tail and the shirt that wasn't a forest shirt at all—her face did something I had only ever seen on screens. It softened in stages. Curiosity slipped into concern. Concern into something gentle that made the wolf's tail wag in a proper arc this time.
I could run. My options rose like cards: sprint, climb, feint and strike, play dead. I didn't move.
She moved first. She did not make herself small. She did not reach out a hand too fast like I was an animal you could pat if you were brave enough. She did not say "It's okay" in a voice that meant "Don't make this difficult." She knelt. Not all the way, but enough that our faces were level. The wolf leaned against her leg, brushing her knee with its shoulder. She rested a hand on its back as if to remind both of them where their center was.
"You're hurt?" she asked, and she did not make it a requirement.
I glanced down. Thin lines scored my forearms where glass had sung to me. Now that she asked, they stung. The sight of blood had never changed anything in the lab. It made some techs bored and some techs angry. Her voice made the stinging louder, like it wanted to be seen for what it was.
I didn't answer. The lab had taught me that silence was a weapon and a shield. She waited anyway.
"My name is Yuna," she said after a breath. The name sat on the clearing like soft weight. She smiled, not with all her teeth, and my chest did that wideness again. She ghosted her fingers over the wolf's shoulder. "This is Kaji. He's better at finding lost things than I am."
Lost.
The word hit something. Not a bruise. A vacancy.
"I'm…" I started, and stopped. The lab had given me numbers. Numbers are not names.
Her gaze moved to my ears, not in a way that made me feel pinned to the ground. It moved like she was adjusting her own eyes to a brightness she was glad to find.
"It's okay," she said. "You don't have to tell me yet." She unhooked her satchel with one hand, used the other to steady the wolf when he tried to poke his nose into it. "Can I look at your cuts?"
I tensed. Every protocol I had was a line of don't. Don't let them close. Don't be drugged. Don't let anyone bend your wrists. But the word cut wasn't a threat in her voice. It was a thing she could make smaller.
I didn't nod. I also didn't say no.
She took it as permission as gently as you can take anything. She scooted forward on her knees and opened the satchel in my line of sight. Inside lay bundles of herbs bound with twine, small clay jars with wax stoppers, a roll of linen, a little knife with a bone handle wrapped in string to keep it from slipping. She worked with an economy that made my mind watch, count, approve. Her hands were not perfectly clean; dirt had settled in the lines of her nails and the webbing of her fingers. They were steady.
"This might sting," she said, and she said it as if my reaction mattered.
The salve did sting. It was a bright pain, and it carried that sweetness again—flowers warmed by hands, a hearth someone had whispered over. The ache in my arm took a breath and let it out. Yuna wrapped the linen, not too tight, tying the ends in a knot so small and clever I had to watch it twice to understand.
"There," she said. "Better?"
I lifted my arm and put it down. "Better" was a measure like "effective." It meant the goal had been achieved to a greater degree than before. But her eyes asked a question that wasn't about degrees. Her kindness wasn't a chart.
"Yes," I said, because my language only had wrong tools, and this was the one that fit least poorly.
She smiled again. It did something new inside me, an edge softening that I had never had sharpened. She stood, all the way this time, and offered a hand.
"Do you have somewhere to go?"
I looked at the trees. The idea of somewhere-to-go was a labyrinth. The lab had only ever had somewhere-to-be-kept. I shook my head.
"Okay," she said. One word, and it made a small space. "It's a little walk to the village. There's a river in between. We can stop and I can wash the blood there. You can tell me if the water is too cold." She paused. "I won't touch you unless you ask."
I didn't know how to ask.
I didn't take her hand, but I stood when she did. Kaji sniffed the air around my knee like I was a leaf the wind had dropped. He sneezed and wagged. When I shifted my weight, my tail brushed his flank. He looked offended for a heartbeat, then delighted.
As we stepped into the trees, light dappled and moved across us like notes on a river. Yuna walked a half-step ahead and then remembered and fell a half-step back, so we were side by side. She didn't try to fill the air. The forest did that. The creek's voice grew larger until it was a real thing with direction and white spindrift on stones. The path wasn't a path, but she knew where to put her feet, so I matched her choices.
"What's that?" she asked, once, when a little insect scissored past my ear and I flinched, not backward but down. "The bug? He won't bite. He thinks we're flowers."
I considered being a flower. I decided not to be.
The river was a clear shallow ribbon pushing against stones with small insistences. Sunlight wove itself through leaves and spilled onto the surface and the water gathered it and broke it and carried it away in little coins. Yuna knelt and scooped water into her palms. She drank, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and made a face because she'd gotten her nose.
She looked at me. "Can I…?" She touched her own cheek with two fingers and then held them up in offering. "Just the blood. You can do it, too."
I crouched. The water had a new smell—the cold nose of it, the minerals, the plant-soft. I lifted my hands and tried to mirror her. My fingers looked wrong in the water, longer, thinner, the nails glinting as if interested in the sun. I scooped. Water fell through the gap between my hands and laughed at me. The second try worked. I pressed the cool against my face. The sting went with it, the salve's warmth flaring and then quieting.
"Good," she said softly, and I didn't understand why that word made my shoulders relax.
We crossed where the stones lay shallowest. Kaji went first and then came back, as if the only way to stay is to leave and return. When we reached the far bank, Yuna hesitated. She had an expression like standing at a door you know you should knock on but you can't tell if it's the right house.
"I know it's… a lot," she said. "People. Questions. I can talk for you if you want me to." She added, as if she were negotiating with the air rather than me, "And if you don't want to stay, we'll go. There are empty shepherd cabins in the low hills. The dogs are friendlier than the shepherds."
I recognized the shape of a trap, and there was none. It made me feel unsteady, like stepping onto a boat and not knowing how it will move under you, only knowing it will.
"Why?" I asked before I could plan the question. My voice sounded smaller near the river, like it had been washed and left to dry.
She took a breath. The answer did not arrive written behind her eyes. She had to find it. "Because you look like you don't remember what it's like to be safe," she said. "And also… I want to know your name." Her mouth tipped, one corner up and then flattening because she was checking herself. "I like giving names to lost things."
"I don't have one," I said. It should have been shame. It wasn't. It was an empty shelf I had been told to keep clean.
Yuna glanced at my tail, which had decided, without permission, to curl toward her like a question again. "We can borrow one," she said. "Until yours comes back to you. That's what my grandmother taught me—names return if you hold a place for them."
Names return.
In the lab, names were labels. The techs wore them on their coats. They did not return anything. They stuck. They hurt when they were ripped off.
"What would I be?" I asked, and the forest listened like it had been waiting for the sound of my question all morning.
Yuna looked at me the way you look at a skyline—taking the whole thing into your eyes first, then letting them rest on a tower, a cloud, a hawk riding a thermal. She didn't rush. She took in the ears that twitched when the river chuckled. She took in the tail that couldn't make up its mind about permission. She took in the cut on my cheek and the hospital shirt that didn't belong to this world.
"You feel like… dawn," she said slowly. "Like the air right before light. Not because you're new. Because you're quieter than morning and louder than night." She smiled, that small, warm thing. "Akira," she said. The sound brushed the trees. "Will that do? Just for now?"
The name touched a place I hadn't known was there. It didn't fill it; it made room around it, like loosening a bandage. The air seemed larger. Kaji sneezed, as if the name had made dust.
"Akira," I said, and the syllables clicked in my mouth. They weren't numbers. They were something you could give and not lose. They were a bridge between how I heard myself and how someone else could call me. My ears tipped forward as if listening to my own voice was a thing they could learn.
Yuna brightened, not all at once, but along the edges first. "Hi, Akira," she said. The way she said it, it felt like she had set a little lantern between us.
The village was not large enough to be noisy in the way cities are, but it had layers of sound I didn't know what to do with. Chickens negotiated in a yard. A woman laughed from a window and then scolded with her laugh still tangled in her scold. A boy ran past with a bucket and water splashed on his bare feet and he yelped like the river had pinched him. The air grew thicker with cooking—onions, hearth bread, something sweet and tart.
People saw us. They saw Yuna and her wolf and her satchel and didn't read her as a threat. They saw me and that was different. I felt their eyes like pattering rain, not harmful, not warm. Measuring rain.
Yuna kept herself shaped to my side. When a man in a leather apron opened his mouth with a question in it, Yuna tilted her head in a way that made the question go back into his mouth. Not because she had power to do so, but because her kindness took up space and asked everybody to wait their turn.
We reached a building that was nothing like the lab. It was a house that had become a house again and again. The roofline had a new patch and a newer patch. The door had been sanded and repainted until the grain was as soft as cloth. Herbs hung from the rafters above the porch, upside down, their scent mixing and making a green-thick shade. A faded cloth was pinned over the doorway with a pattern stitched into it—little foxes and little wolves running in a circle that never quite closed, as if leaving room for one more animal to join.
Inside: room, light, wood. An older woman turned from a table and wiped her hands on an apron that had been washed so often it was the memory of cloth. Her hair was gray and braided up and around like summer bread. Her eyes were Yuna's eyes, the warm kind, but steadier, like coals.
"Back late," she said, voice rough with work and smoke, and then she saw me and let the word late decide to be two meanings. "Oh."
"This is Akira," Yuna said, and the name came out of her like a gift she had held in her hands all the way back so she could lift it just like this. "I found—Kaji found her by Foxcreek. She's hurt. She doesn't have… a place, yet."
The older woman's gaze touched my face and then slipped away on purpose, so it wouldn't pin me. She saw the ears. She saw the tail. She did not let her eyes dwell. She nodded slightly to both of them like they were neighbors arriving at the same time. "I'm Hana," she said. "Sit, if you want. Or stand. Or walk in a little circle so your feet know this floor, and then sit. Sometimes that helps."
My feet did not need to know floors. They needed to know escape routes. But the floor was wood, and it made a small sound when I stepped, and that sound built a picture I didn't expect—a picture you could climb onto without being afraid it would roll away from you.
I walked in a little circle. Kaji's tail thumped the table leg. Hana pretended not to smile.
"Do you want bread?" she asked. "It's new today. Not bragging."
Want was a wild word. The lab's hunger had been scheduled. Food was fuel. Bread was a slice of weight. This bread was warm. When Hana cut it, steam curled. When she put butter on it, the butter ran and fell off and she caught it with a finger and then licked that finger like a child and made a face because she'd done it in front of me. Her embarrassment was softer than anything here. It didn't hurt. It made space.
I didn't say yes. She put the bread in front of me anyway and put another slice beside it like she expected me not to know which size fit.
I ate. It turned out that having a mouth and teeth and a tongue can be a way to understand a world. Warm. Salt. The green little corner of an herb in the butter. The way bread sounds when you tear it with your hands. The way you can tell that someone has made this exact bread enough times to know when to stop kneading, because their hands know the dough better than their eyes do.
When I finished, Yuna set a cup in front of me filled with water with three leaves floating on it. They smelled like sunshine had tried to be a plant and succeeded. I drank, and a small warmth went down my throat that wasn't heat and wasn't sweetness. It made a line through me where my cold lived.
Hana moved around the room, not busying herself as a way to look away, but because the room asked things of her and she answered. Yuna's eyes kept sliding to me as if she were checking a knot. Not to see if I would run, but to see if I would fray.
"Where are you from?" Hana asked at last, not because she needed to know, but because she wanted to see what the question would do.
"Far," I said. It was a lie. It was also true. It was everything I had. "Not here."
"Not here," Hana echoed, and let far lie down and sleep.
I felt something then that the lab did not have a chart for. Not the wideness. Not the softening. Something that made my fingers want to curl in on themselves and my tail want to be long and straight all at once. It pricked behind my eyes. It asked for exit. I didn't know the exit.
Yuna's hand brushed the table near mine and stopped just short like she was testing the air for heat. "If you want," she said, and then she changed want to something else with a breath. "If it would help, I could show you the school tomorrow." Her voice warmed on the word could. "There are children. And some not-children. The teachers are decent. Mostly. There's a girl your age who can talk to bees." She wrinkled her nose because she liked the bees but didn't love how they landed on her. "It's… not hard there, not the first day. They let you watch."
School.
A concept. A building. A structure designed to change a person in ways that could be measured across years. In the lab, education had been targeted and thin, like wires into a heart, precise and limited. School was, in my head, a fog with laughter in it. It frightened me in a way that didn't feel like danger. It felt like the edge of a cliff you could jump from and land in a lake.
"I don't know how to…" I began, and my voice ran out of road.
"That's the best way," Hana said briskly, setting a jar on a shelf and letting the shelf take the jar's weight. "Knowing how is for after. The first day is for not-knowing. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are a fool and will be proven one by lunchtime."
Yuna's grin—a flash this time—bent something inside me so gently I didn't feel it until afterward.
We made a space for me that wasn't mine yet. Hana pulled a pallet from beneath a bed that had seen more seasons than I had seen calendars. She shook it outside because the dust preferred to be wind. Yuna found a blanket with foxes running around the edge and the thread had gone thin where small hands had picked at it, so she put it on top because softness is a better introduction than perfection. They acted as if I had already said yes.
When the orange of evening braided itself into the light, I lay on a bed that did not restrain me and watched the ceiling think about the day. The weight of the blanket was a language my body understood without study. My tail found a place it liked along my thigh. My ears heard things rooms had never let me hear: the village settling; someone telling a joke in a yard and then the quiet pop of a cork and then two voices harmonizing in laughter; the hush a house makes when it remembers to be a house.
Yuna sat on the floor near the pallet with her legs folded under her and her back against the bed frame. Kaji sprawled beside her, the useful part of his day finished, the tender part beginning. He sighed in that way wolves and dogs sigh when the world is allowed to be as it is. Yuna had a book open in her lap. It was bound in a leather that had been buffed by years until it was more hand than hide. The words were not lab words; they curled and leaned, not straight like code. She read without moving her lips, and sometimes she made a little noise in her throat when she liked a sentence, and never apologized for that noise.
"Do you want me to leave the candle?" she asked as the light thinned. "Some people sleep better if there's a small light. Some sleep better if there isn't."
"I don't sleep," I said before I remembered that I did, sometimes, in ten-minute slices between tests.
"Then you probably need to," Hana said from the other room, not unkindly at all.
"Leave it," I said, and the words felt like a door opening and a door closing. "Please." I said the please because I had heard a child in the lane use it, and the sound it made in the air seemed to make the air behave better.
Yuna blew the candle just enough to make the flame smaller, not dead. "Goodnight, Akira," she said, and that new little lantern glowed again when she said my name.
Something in me loosened and did not slide away. The pricking behind my eyes returned. It had a shape now. It pressed. It found an exit.
I began to cry.
It was not the deep sobbing of loss. I did not have loss yet. It was not loud. It was water finding cracks in stone because it had to move. It surprised me. It shook me a little, not my bones, the membrane over them. It made the breath in my chest hitch and then continue. It made the candle look larger and smaller in turn.
Yuna's head came up like a wolf hearing its name at a distance. She did not touch me. She slid her hand until the back of it rested on the pallet near my shoulder, not even the warmth of it, the promise. "It's okay," she said, the way you say it to rain. Not to stop it. To tell it the roof is sound. "You don't have to be quiet here."
My body had never known what to do with a sentence like that. It tried everything. It made small sounds that could have been laughter and could have been pain. It made a long sigh like a winter river when it decides to break and go under the ice anyway. It made silence again. When the silence returned, it didn't feel like control. It felt like rest.
"I don't know how to be… with people," I said into the blanket. The word people felt too big in my mouth and I swallowed some of it.
"That's okay," Yuna said. "People don't know, either. They just pretend."
"Why are you…" I didn't finish. I didn't know which word to try: helping, kind, here. All of them were too heavy.
Yuna considered the ceiling as if it had written down an answer. "Because when I was eight I got lost in the fog," she said. "Not the regular kind. The kind that gets in your head. Kaji found me and my grandmother held my hand even when I didn't feel like my hand was attached to me. It was raining. I wasn't wet. That was worse than being wet. My grandmother lit a little lantern anyway and told me to watch the flame until the rain remembered me. It did. That's how I know that sometimes… all someone needs is for another person to sit near their frame and not pull the threads."
I did not understand all of her sentence. I understood enough to know that my chest's wideness was a place you could put a light and not burn the house down.
"Tomorrow," Yuna said softly, "we can go see the school. And on the way, if you want, you can tell me the names of the leaves you don't know. I don't know them, either, but I'm good at pretending I do until someone corrects me."
I didn't say yes. I didn't say no.
The candle's flame ticked.
Kaji's paws twitched; he was running after something in his sleep, perhaps the little boy's laughter, perhaps the smell of new bread. Hana's chair in the other room creaked as she shifted and a page turned. The forest breathed at the edges of the village. The river shouldn't have been audible from here, but it was, very faint, the same coin-laughter it had made when it ran over stones earlier, or perhaps a memory of it held in the air.
I turned onto my side so I could see Yuna without making it obvious that I was watching. My ear tipped with me, betraying me entirely. Yuna made her mouth straight so it wouldn't smile and made it worse by failing and smiling anyway. She looked at the candle and then at me and then at the place between us.
"Goodnight," she said again, not because I hadn't heard, but because some words are meant to be said twice, like a hand palming a door frame as you pass and then palming it again when you come back, so the door knows you.
My tail slid along my leg and found a position it liked that made no sense to anyone but both of us. My eyes shut. Not because I ordered them. Because they trusted the room to be the kind that would hold their closing.
In the lab, sleep had been an interruption. Here, it was a path.
As I fell, a thought floated up, not entirely mine and not entirely not: tails, plural, waiting in me like seeds in snow. Not growing because someone said grow. Growing because spring is rude to winter in just the right way.
When I slept, light through leaves dreamed me.
When I woke—hours later or a year—the candle was a comma in the room. The sky outside the window was not dawn yet, but it was thinking about it. Yuna had fallen asleep on the floor with her hand still near the pallet, palm up, as if she had been holding out a name so long that it had changed the shape of her hand.
My chest did the wideness again. The pricking behind my eyes waited politely, as if asking permission instead of breaking through.
"Akira," I whispered into the wool. The name didn't stay in my mouth. It nested in the room.
The tip of my tail flicked, and for a heartbeat, a faint glow ran along it, not fire, not lightning—a suggestion of light, the idea of a candle that had not been lit yet.
I did not smile because I didn't know how to make all my muscles move in that shape. But my mouth tried, a little. And the trying felt like a beginning.