“You got it? This is the last one! No more!”

Asi’s ears quiver in anticipation, tail up and alert. If he ‘gets it,’ he gives no sign.

Drawing her arm back as far as she can, Kirsten puts her back into the pitch, sending the much-chewed piece of wood unerringly onto the clinic’s doorstep. “Go!”

Asi leaps to retrieve it, covering the ten yards there and the ten yards back to her in huge, galloping bounds and coming to a skidding halt to drop the stick at her feet. He whines softly, looking up at her face, then fixes his attention once again on her throwing hand. “No, that’s it. Done for the day.” She shakes her head at his expression, which segues from anticipation to incomprehension to utter canine dejection. “And making me feel guilty won’t work, either. How’d you like to go visit the new pup? Since we’re already here?”

Asi does not respond to that, and she ruffles the fur of his neck lightly, tugging at his collar as she moves toward the entrance. “Come on, fella.”

It is purely by chance, of course, that she finds herself just outside the veterinary hospital. Wearied by endless and endlessly futile sifting of code strings for the single line of integers that will shut down the androids once and permanently, she has shut her mathematical conundrums firmly in the house behind her and fled into the open air. It is something she finds herself doing more and more often as the March light warms toward the inevitable spring and the wind softens and veers about into the south. And, purely by chance, her walk has led her here. Her only deliberate choice, she assures herself, has been been to avoid the woods, inhabited as they are by motor-mouthed raccoons and god knows what else. Banshees, maybe.

Fra ghoulies an’ ghaisties,An’ lang-leggedy beasties,An’ things that gae bump in the nicht,Guid Lord, deliver us.

The ancient rhyme says nothing about beasties with long, bushy ringed tails and black masks, but she’s sure the omission is inadvertent.

If they’d only known. . . .

A wailing from hell greets her as she pushes open the door, its chime lost in the howling that rips its way up and down the scale. Asi barks sharply, and Kirsten shushes him. The single person in the waiting room, an airman in a flight suit, leaps to his feet and unzips the side of an over-the –shoulder carrier, nervously adjusting the towel on its floor. “Sorry Ma’am. Callas doesn’t like to have her ears touched.”

As if on cue, Shannon emerges from a treatment room behind the counter, the sound growing louder with her approach. Clinging to the front of her smock with all four feet is a young calico cat, ears folded close to her head and her mouth wide open and yowling like a panther in heat. At least, it is what Kirsten imagines a panther in heat would sound like. She has never actually heard one singing her come hithers.

Claw by sabre claw, Shannon detaches the small creature, and with the aid of her human, carefully backs her into her carrier. An abrupt silence falls, replaced after a moment with a soft rumbling sound. From her pocket Shannon removes a long-snouted tube of ointment and a small plastic bottle of pale yellow liquid. “Here you go, Lieutenant. Tritop in the ears twice a day, Clavamox by mouth likewise. Hydrogen peroxide on the scratches, or wear heavy gloves.”

“Gotcha.” With a long stroke down Callas’ back and a scratch under her chin, the Lieutenant zips her up. “Thanks, Shannon. Ma’am.” He sketches a salute at Kirsten, who acknowledges it after a moment of frozen startlement, then shoulders the carrier and sets off out the door and down the sidewalk at a brisk pace. Kirsten’s eyes follow him as he turns the corner, heading for the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters. Almost no one is driving anymore. It has been days since she has seen anything but an official vehicle on the road; since the attempted assault on the gate, in fact. Conservation is setting in.

“Can I help you, Ma’am? Does Asimov need anything?”

Kirsten, faced with having to explain why she is here, finds herself suddenly embarrassed. She can feel the heat spreading over her face, her annoyance at herself only making it worse. “No, I— That is, we were out for a walk, and—”

“And you wanted to stop by and see the wolf pup?” Shannon grins at her. “It’s okay. You’d be surprised how many people just ‘happen’ to be passing by. Callas and her ear mites were only the second real case I’ve had today.”

“It’s all right? I wouldn’t want to upset the mother or anything.”

“Sure. Asi’d better stay here, though. The only strange males she’s tolerating are human ones.”

Kirsten gives his ears a ruffle. “Sorry, boy. Lie down.”

The big dog folds down on his elbows with obvious reluctance but without argument. With a last glance to make sure he remains, Kirsten follows Shannon through the waiting area and past the examining rooms and surgery. As they approach the wards, the smell of chlorine reaches her, and she steps lightly into the waiting basin of disinfectant without needing to be reminded.

”She’s in Iso,” Shannon says, leading her down a short corridor toward a closed door. “Go on in.”

The smell of bleach is stronger here, and there is a second dishpan of the pungent liquid to the side of the entrance. Kirsten steps in and out of it almost automatically now, the familiarity of the clinic beginning to fit around her like her skin. And yet it is not the clinic itself, but the presence she feels here, the woman who, even absent, has left something of herself in the calm efficiency with which patients are cared for, in the passionate strength of her own caring.

Which is, if she is honest with herself, the real reason she is here: that there is no other place she can go which resonates more strongly of Dakota Rivers.

The light in Isolation is dim, and Kirsten almost gasps as she closes the door quietly behind her. Seated in an old fashioned rocking chair next to a bank of cages, a figure sits with head bent, all attention focused on the small bundle in the crook of its left arm, a miniature nursing bottle in its right hand. The clear profile, the cant of the head, the long legs and graceful hands are all Dakota’s. The sight, unexpected as it is, strikes the breath from Kirsten’s lungs and sets her heart to pounding against her sternum like a wild thing against he bars of its prison. Her lips burn at the memory of the fleeting kiss at their parting, fire streaming along the network of her veins into every cell in her body. “Dakota?” she says softly. Then, louder, “Koda? I thought you’d gone.”

“Kirsten?” The figure looks up, turning toward the light from the hallway.

Brown eyes, not blue. Hair just brushing broad shoulders, not quite long enough to braid, not the wild mane that flows halfway down Dakota’s back. Boots and feet too big to be a woman’s, even a woman standing six feet toward heaven.

“Ta- Tacoma? I’m sorry, I thought—” Kirsten takes an involuntary step backward, her face flaming now with embarrassment.

“That I was Koda?” A rueful smile touches his mouth, so like his sister’s that Kirsten is nearly lost again. “People have been confusing us ever since we were small, even in broad daylight.” The pup in his lap whimpers, and he adjusts his hand under the small body, tilting the bottle at a sharper angle. “We used to switch places sometimes. It drove the nuns wild until they finally noticed that our eyes were different.”

“How long did that take? You’d think it was obvious.” He is giving her time to recover, though how exactly he knows of her discomfort is not at all clear. Perhaps all Lakota people are uncannily intuitive.

Or perhaps it’s just the Rivers family.

Tacoma shrugs. “People see what they expect to see. We’re Lakota; Lakotas all have black hair and dark eyes and say ‘How.’ We wore the same dark blue pants and the same shirts starched so stiff you had to wear an undershirt just to keep from being sandpapered. I was in seventh grade and Koda in fifth before they got it figured out.”

A wheezing gurgle startles Kirsten, and Tacoma gently disengages the bottle from the pup’s mouth. “Hold him for a minute while I get a refill, will you? He draws on this thing like an irrigation pump.”

Gingerly Kirsten accepts the small bundle, both hands under his spine. His muzzle is blunt and his ears floppy, eyes just beginning to open the cloudy blue of any infant’s. There is no hint in his round belly and blunt paws of the formidable creature he will be two years from now, no shadow of the power his father had possessed even in the last moments of his life. He makes a small mewling sound, not unlike a kitten, and she presses him close to her body, rocking him gently as she would a human child. “Tacoma,” she says suddenly. “Do wolves ever have blue eyes? When they’re grown, I mean.”

He looks up from mixing the formula, pouring powder and sterile water into a blender that whirrs quietly. “I suppose it’s possible. Huskies have to have gotten their blue eyes somewhere, after all.”

“Have you ever seen one? A wolf with blue eyes?”

“Not in the wild, no.” He does not add, Why do you ask? though the question is in his face as he decants the formula into a newly sterilized bottle.

She has no answer to that question that she is willing to give him; no answer that she is willing to give anyone . I saw one in a dream. I saw those same eyes in your sister’s face. Instead she says, “Can I feed him? I’ve raised orphan puppies before.”

“Sure,” he answers, handing her the bottle. “That’ll give me a chance to check on mama and give her meds.”

“Is she still too sick to nurse him?”

Tacoma hunkers down in front of one of the lower tiers against the opposite wall. “She wants to, and she can care for him otherwise, but she hasn’t enough milk. She was really badly dehydrated when she came in. She’s still on IV’s.” As he speaks, he checks the drip in the long, clear plastic tube that runs from a flaccid plastic bag hooked onto the bars of the cage above. “Time to hang some more Ringer’s on her.”

He removes the empty bag and steps out into the larger ward, pausing without apparent thought to step in and out of the disinfectant. It seems to be something he does the way he breathes, so long accustomed as to be automatic. She is irrationally pleased that she seems to be acquiring the habit herself, almost without having to remind herself. She is fitting in. She is not terribly sure yet what exactly she is fitting into, but she knows in her bones that she has not wanted to fit into anything so badly since she was a child, cut off from the outside world first by her up-the-wall-and-into-the-ozone IQ, then from almost all the rest of it by her deafness. Perversely, the lack of sound had been a comfort, undemanding in its enforced silence.

For the moment, though, she is this small wild thing’s surrogate mother. Kirsten settles herself against the back of the rocker with the pup against her midsection. The chair, which Tacoma had filled to overflowing, very nearly swallows her so that she finds her feet dangling, toes just brushing the concrete floor. She pushes off from it, setting the chair to rocking gently. The pup, gazing up at her with half-closed eyes, perfectly trusting, evokes instincts she would deny possessing, deny with her last breath. Protect. Nurture. Love. He takes the elongated plastic nipple with no more hesitation than if he were snuggled up to his wolf mother herself. He fumbles at it a bit because he still cannot see clearly, gives a couple of smacks and snorts until he gets the suction going. The level of milk in the bottle begins to fall, slowly but steadily..

Protect. Nurture. They are instincts which Tacoma seems to possess without embarrassment. It is not a lack of macho; Christ, she has seen him on the battlefield, spraying death from an M-16 on full automatic, lobbing round after round of explosives into the lines of mixed droid and humans. With a chill that shivers her spine, she remembers the moment when he called in the strike on his own position, and Dakota’s berserkergang that had lifted Maggie, herself, their whole army up and out of themselves and made of their small makeshift force an invincible, unified instrument of one woman’s will.

From the lowest tier of cages across from her comes a shifting of weight, a low, searching whimper. The mother wolf, looking for her cub. Careful not to dislodge the bottle, Kirsten rises from the chair, crosses the space between and lowers herself into a cross-legged position in front of the cage. “Here he is, mama,” she says softly. “I’ve got him. He’s safe.”

Seemingly reassured, the mother settles her head on her paws, her eyes never leaving Kirsten. They are the color of old bronze coins, not blue, but they have in them the courage and the steadfastness of the eyes she has seen in dreams. The eyes that somehow are both a wolf’s eyes and Dakota Rivers’.