“Christ, you’re dumb.” Without realizing it, she has spoken aloud. Pieces of the puzzle fall into place, locking smoothly and without seam. Item: Dakota Rivers has blue eyes. Blue eyes that, strictly speaking, ethnically speaking, she should not have. Item: the wolf of Kirsten’s dreams, or hallucinations or whatever they were, also has blue eyes. Item: Dakota has—her throat tightens with the thought and salt stings her eyes— or had a somehow intimate and loving relationship with the alpha wolf who was this small scrap’s father. The wolf, obviously, is Dakota’s spirit animal, with whatever that entails for someone who, unlike herself, has been brought up fully accepting that the barriers between the human and non-human worlds are both fragile and fluid. That one can have friends and relations who do not walk on two legs and who do have fur. That one can. . .

Another shiver passes over her, uncontrollable as the thought that spawns it. That one can, somehow, become a non-human being, in spirit and perhaps even . . . But she cannot bring herself even to finish that thought. It is too alien, too far from the familiar terrain of logic, of the physical determinism that has bounded her thought all her thinking life.

And that, in turn, brings her around to a mouthy, cynical raccoon speaking in riddles by a thawing stream. Her spirit animal. A creature who bears the same relation to her that the alpha wolf did to Dakota.

A creature notorious for curiosity and its long, clever, mischief-making hands. A masked creature, not given to self-revelation. A creature, Dakota had said, whose stock in trade is transformation.

Kirsten can feel that transformation at work in herself, however hard she works to ignore it. She is here on the floor of a veterinary isolation ward with the pungent perfume of Clorox in her nostrils not because she has “just happened” to follow Asi’s pursuit of a birch twig, not even because she has genuinely wanted to visit the wolf mother and her baby. (Maybe even pet them? Make friends as she has with domestic dogs all her life?) She is here because this is Dakota’s place. Here she can be close to the woman whose many skills she is only beginning to understand, and to feelings in herself that she is not anywhere close to beginning to understand. It occurs to her that Tacoma is taking an unusually long time to fetch a bag of saline and a syringe of antibiotic. Perhaps he senses her need—an idea she finds half embarrassing and half comforting—and is too polite to intrude.

Halfway down the bottle, the nipple falls out of the pups mouth. Eyes closed, his head drops back against her arm, himself into a wolf’s dreams. After a few moments, his paws and eyelids begin to twitch, his breath coming in soft whuffles. His mother seems to have dropped off, too, no longer unsure of her infant or her infant’s new nursemaid. Briefly Kirsten considers opening the cage to lay the cub beside her. Discretion, Little K. Discretion is almost always the better part of valor. Common sense almost never kills anybody. Go with the stats. Odd, how she can still hear her father’s voice in her head after all these years, remembered from years when she could not hear at all.

Shifting her legs beneath her, she settles down to wait.

Twice she catches her own head beginning to fall onto her chest. The pup’s contentment and his mother’s calm must be contagious. Twice she pulls herself up, wide-eyed, from the edge of sleep. She cannot think what is keeping Tacoma. Perhaps she should put the pup down and offer to help with whatever it is.

The thought passes, though, as once again the light seems to change around her. She is standing on a green hill far away, distant in time and the stretch of miles. Below her lies a valley dotted with campfires in the dusk, a long white twilight that pales the summer stars. Behind her is her own fire, ringed with stones and set within a grove of birch and ancient oak. A woman stands beside her, tall and slender and naked except for her boots and the high-bossed oval shield, painted with unfurling dragon wings, that leans against her knee. Her right hand holds a spear, butted against the ground; the strap of her baldric defines the valley of her breasts with its own stream of blue and silver. Kirsten takes in the proud body, painted in whorls and starbursts of the same deep blue that matches her eyes, scarred here and there with the marks of battle. The woman’s coppery hair wreathes her head in an intricate arrangement of braids: the mionn, meant to deny an enemy’s hands a hold.

With a shock, Kirsten realizes that she, too, is nearly naked. Not just naked but almost identically painted and armed except that she holds a crescent-shaped axe in her left hand, and only a hair’s less high than the woman beside her. The tightness of her scalp tells her that she is likewise crowned with braids, a glance downward that her own hair is black as a raven’s wing. In a language at once musical and harsh, the red woman says softly, “And the hero-light shone about you that time I first saw you on the banks of the Dubhglass, anama-chara, and I knew then I would do anything to have you for my soul-friend.”

“And now that you have me, mo cridh, what will you do with me?”

The other woman’s free hand caresses her shoulder. “Come back to our fire, and I will show you.”

The snap of a closing door brings Kirsten gasping out of her dream. It is one she has dreamed the past night and the night before that, ever since her conversation with the raccoon in the woods. The red woman is one of those who warned her back in her spiral toward death, but the rest is both new and strangely familiar. Before she can make sense of it, a voice cuts through the fog that surrounds her, lightly amused and male. “Sorry to wake you. You three look really comfortable together.”

Tacoma, returning with a bag of Ringer’s and a hypodermic filled with a milky liquid. Kirsten feels her cheeks flame as she remembers twice waking from the dream with her thighs sticky and her heart pounding;. A brief inventory assures her that she has awakened in time to avoid embarrassment, the pup still firmly held against her, still snoring softly. His milky scent comes to her on his breath.

“I guess I just dropped off. Sorry.”

“You needed a break. Here, let’s put the little guy back with his mama. He’ll keep her mind off what I’m doing.” Tacoma hunkers down and snaps open the cage door, waking the mother wolf. He grins. “Go on. It’s okay.”

Kirsten levers herself up onto her knees, careful to hold her small burden steady, leans forward and gently lays him on the blanket beside his mother. Lightly her nose touches Kirsten’s hand, sniffing, then drops to her pup as she begins to bathe him. Kirsten cannot help herself. She reaches forward and strokes the wolf’s beautifully sculpted head, feeling the brittle dryness of her fur, the papery texture of her skin. “She’ll be okay?” It is all she can do to keep the tears from her voice.

”She’ll be okay. She’s reacting well to the drugs and a steady diet. Come summer we should be able to release them.”

With a start, Kirsten realizes how little she knows about Dakota’s brother. “Are you a vet, too?”

He laughs as he straightens up and begins to fasten the bag of Ringer’s to the drip tube, checking the clamp for proper tension. “I’m an engineer, by education if not trade. Comes in handy from time to time—we’ll be bringing a few of those big wind generators for the Base next week.. They won’t feed us, but at least we’ll have refrigeration and lights. And laundry,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. “Manny’s even tireder than I am of washing his socks in the bathroom sink.”

“That’s enough to earn you years of undying gratitude believe me.” Then, coming back to her question, “I just thought—” she makes a gesture that encompasses the ward, the two wolves, his deftness with the trappings of medicine.

“I know. Lots of people think the same thing. It’s just something that comes from growing up in a big family, on a ranch, though.” Tacoma uncaps the syringe with his teeth and, holding the line steady, begins to inject the medication into the IV. “Good old Penicillin. Can’t beat it. You’re an only child, Kirsten?”

She is taken aback. “Does it show?”

“Not really. It’s just that when there are ten of you, like there are of us, you can change a diaper and give a bottle before the training wheels come off your bike. Same with the cats and dogs and cows and horses. We all learned what to do about colic or a breach birth before we quite figured out how the colt got inside his mama in the first place.”

“That young, huh?” She grins at him.

“Oh, even younger than you can imagine.” He returns the smile, looking again so like his sister that Kirsten’s breath leaves her lungs. ‘There’s some coffee if you’d like—“

“Sergeant! Sergeant Rivers!”

The shout interrupts him, repeated to the pounding of feet in the corridor. Shannon bursts through the door, her face and hair wild, “Sergeant—“

“Bleach!” he barks at her, the Master Sergeant suddenly displacing the charming rancher and the rough-and-ready vet with a vengeance.

Shannon hops in and out of the basin with the speed of a Phillipine bamboo dancer. “Sergeant, it’s your cousin, the Lieutenant. He’s out front—“

But Tacoma is gone before the first sentence is out, Kirsten on his heels.

*

Dark is drawing down as Koda lowers the binoculars from her eyes and nods, satisfied with what she’s seen. The Caresaway Birthing Center is a smallish one-story structure bordered by attractively landscaped grounds that are only now beginning to grow ragged. The facility has two entrances. The rear entrance, for deliveries, is locked from the outside with several lengths of chain and three stout padlocks. The main entrance, at the end of a long, winding pathway, is guarded by a single android bearing a nasty semi-automatic weapon. She briefly considers using Kirsten’s handy little device to gain entry, then discards the idea, not knowing for sure how long it will take to round up the women kept captive inside and not wanting to take the chance of the droids “waking up” in the middle of her evacuation and spraying bullets all over the place.

The minicomp is a comforting weight against her chest, and she finds herself smiling as she thinks back on her parting from Kirsten. The feeling of the kiss still lingers, sparking tiny bits of fire along her nerve endings, like an Independence Day sparkler held in a child’s hand. After hours of thinking about it on the drive up to this place, she still isn’t sure exactly what possessed her to act in such a manner with Kirsten—a woman whose emotional walls are so thick that they likely give the Maginot Line pause. She realizes that if she had stopped to think at that moment, it probably wouldn’t have happened at all. Not because there isn’t an multi-layered attraction there, because there is and it is something she’d admitted to herself quite some time ago.

Perhaps it’s because everything about Kirsten King screams “keep out!” in huge neon letters, and Koda has been conditioned from an early age to respect such signs.

Until that one moment in time where she could no more stop her body’s instinctive actions than she could will her heart to stop beating.

With a soft sigh, she relegates those thoughts to the back of her mind where they’ll need to stay until she sees this task she’s set for herself to full completion.

As she watches, a tall man with thick hair and a bushy moustache exits the facility and begins speaking with the android guarding the entrance. Both look up, guns raised, as a herd of winter-thin deer bound from the woods across the neat grounds in huge, panicked leaps.

It is the distraction Dakota needs, and she leaves her tree-lined shelter, darting around the perimeter of the facility until she reaches the west wall. She presses herself tightly against it, feeling the bricks’ chill seeping through her jacket and shirt. To her right, there is a polarized window standing slightly open. She peers carefully through the small slit, and sees that the room beyond is empty and dark.

Sliding careful fingers into the seam, she eases the window open just enough for her to be able to squeeze through. Then, with a soft grunt, she hefts herself up and over the lip of the window and inside the darkened room, freezing the instant her feet touch the heavily carpeted floor. A moment later, she is moving again, silent as a shadow trailing a running man. At the doorway, she pauses again, then slips through and into the empty hallway beyond.

The blueprints she’d downloaded from the computer firmly in her mind, she slides along the hallway wall until she comes to the next doorway. She can hear the muffled sounds of life within: a pen scratching on a piece of paper, the soft hum of medical equipment monitoring and infusing, the deep relaxed breaths of the sleeping and the drugged. She is visible for no more than an instant as she takes in the scene before ducking back out and melding herself to the wall, processing what she’s seen.