Darya walked through the yard on her way to the supply shed. Normal route. Normal pace. Nothing unusual.

Lily stopped. The butterfly forgotten. She watched Darya cross the yard, and then she turned and walked in the opposite direction. Not running. Not scared. Just... away. The deliberate, unhurried departure of a child avoiding something she didn't want to be near.

I found her after dinner. She was in our quarters, on the floor, the wooden wolf and the wooden bird arranged in front of her like an audience. Drawing.

"You don't like the new woman," I said. "Darya."

Lily kept drawing. The charcoal moved across the parchment in slow, careful strokes.

"Her wolf feels funny," she said.

"Funny how?"

"Like it's wearing a mask." She looked up at me. The silver threads in her hair caught the lamplight. "You know when someone smiles but they're not really smiling? Their face is doing it but the smile isn't real?"

"Yes."

"Her wolf is doing that. It's being a wolf, but it's not being... her wolf." She went back to drawing. "It's pretending."

I sat with that for a moment. My daughter was seven. She said strange things sometimes — things that were impossible to verify and impossible to ignore. She'd been right about the neutral wolves during the siege. She'd been right about the Council strike team that tried to breach the safe house. Her instincts operated on a frequency that nobody else could hear, and every time I'd dismissed them, I'd been wrong.

But she was also seven. She didn't like new people sometimes. She didn't like change. She'd spent a month in a siege and the aftershocks of that kind of experience could make a child suspicious of anyone unfamiliar.

I kissed the top of her head. "Okay."

"You don't believe me."

"I believe you feel something. I'm going to pay attention to it."

She considered this. Then she held up the drawing. Two wolves and a bird. The gray wolf. The small dark one. And between them, the wooden bird that Soren had carved, rendered in charcoal with the careful detail of a child who drew the world as she understood it.

"Soren's bird can fly," she said. "But it stays because it wants to."

"That's a nice way to think about it."

"That's how wolves should be. They should stay because they want to. Not because their wolf is pretending."

* * *

I found Torren after Lily was asleep.

"The new group," I said. "I need eyes on them."

He nodded. He'd been expecting this — Torren always expected the conversation I hadn't had yet. "Anyone specific?"

"The scarred woman. Darya."

"The one everyone likes?"

"The one Lily's wolf doesn't like."

Torren looked at me. He'd been with me for six years. He'd watched Lily grow from a traumatized five-year-old who wouldn't speak to a seven-year-old whose wolf could freeze trained soldiers. He didn't question Lily's instincts anymore. None of us did.

"I'll put someone on her. Quiet. Nothing she'd notice."

"Quiet is good."

He turned to leave, then stopped. "The supply math isn't great, Rhea. Thirty-four more wolves and the embargo tightening. Maren's numbers say we're down to five months of food if nothing changes."

"I know."

"And if more come?"

I looked toward the south cabins. Lamplight through the windows. Families settling in. Children who'd walked three hundred miles to reach a place they'd been told would take them.

"Then we figure it out," I said. "The same way we've figured out everything else."

Torren left. I stood in the corridor and listened to the territory settling into night. The sounds of a place that was growing faster than it could sustain, filling with wolves who had nowhere else to go and a seven-year-old who could feel the difference between a real wolf and one wearing a mask.

I trusted my daughter's instincts.

But I also trusted the fact that Aldric's new weapon wasn't an army. It was patience. And patience could take any shape. Even a useful, likable, scar-faced woman who made everyone feel at ease.