Tarik's mouth was warm against the back of my neck, and his hand had found the hem of my shirt before I had even locked the dispatch office door behind us. "You are late," I said. "I am exactly on time. You are early." He turned me around by the shoulder. The desk lamp caught the auburn in his hair and the pale blue of his eyes. "You look like you have not slept in three days." "Two. I counted." He laughed and pulled me close. The ferry horn sounded below us on the water, and the window rattled in its frame. The terminal was empty at this hour. Ozan had gone home at ten, and the only light left was the desk lamp and the strip above the registry board, and the pale glow of the screen where the hotline waited. Tarik kissed me before I could say anything else. He was careful at first, the way he always was, as if he expected me to step back. I did not step back. I got a hand into his hair and pulled him down to me, and the careful part of him ended there. We had been doing this for five years. Five years of midnight ferries and stolen hours, of meeting on the European side where nobody from my pack would smell him on me, of washing my hands twice before I went back to the terminal. Five years of a bond I had never declared to a single living wolf. When his fingers found the waistband of my trousers, I stopped thinking about the registry, about Cem, about the law I had sworn to follow. He pressed me against the desk. Papers slid under my back and scattered on the floor. His mouth moved down my throat, slow and deliberate. I got my hands under his shirt and felt the heat of his skin. The office smelled of him, of rain and pine and something beneath it that no human nose would ever name, and my wolf woke up in my chest and turned toward it the way a plant turns toward a window. "Emre," he said against my skin. "Don't talk." "I have to talk. I came here to tell you something." "Tell me after." He laughed again, and then he stopped talking. His hands were on my hips, the desk creaked, and the strip light above the registry board flickered once and steadied. I closed my eyes and let the world outside that little room go quiet. Afterward we lay on the floor together with my coat under us both, and Tarik traced the line of my collarbone with one finger. My hair had come loose from its tie and fallen into my eyes, and he pushed it back. "You look like a man who has been holding his breath for a month," he said. "Maybe I have." I turned my head to look at him. "What did you come to tell me?" He was quiet long enough that I heard the water slapping against the pilings under the terminal. "Deniz is back on this side," he said. "He crossed two nights ago. I thought you should know." My wolf went still. Deniz. Tarik's brother, a name he said as rarely as he could manage. "Back where?" "I don't know. He does not tell me where he sleeps." Tarik sat up and reached for his shirt. "He asked about the terminal. About the schedule of the night watch." "That is not a question a rogue asks for any good reason." "I know." He pulled the shirt over his head. "I told him nothing. But he asked, and now you know." I sat up too. The clock on the wall read eleven forty. "Does Baran know he is here?" "I did not ask. You know what happens when I ask too many questions about Baran." He found his shoes. "I should go before Ozan comes back for his tea flask." "He forgets it every other night." Tarik stood and looked down at me. "Emre. If Deniz comes near this terminal, you call me before you do anything else. Not the Alpha. Me." "Why you?" He did not answer. He crossed to the door, opened it, and the cold air off the Bosphorus came in and took the smell of him out of the room. "Lock this after me," he said, and was gone. I got up, put the papers back in order, and took my place behind the desk at three minutes to midnight. The hotline is not a phone in the ordinary sense. It is a number, and the number is a joke the pack has kept alive for thirty years, because the humans who dial it think they are reaching a lost-and-found line for the ferry company. They get a recording. The wolves get me. The registry pulls the caller's scent from the line, and if the caller is one of ours, the board lights up with their name and their last known position in the territory. I have worked that board for five years. I know every wolf in the Boğaziçi Pack by the weight of their footsteps in a corridor. At twelve exactly I logged the shift open. The board was quiet. I drank half of Ozan's tea standing at the window, watching the lights on the far shore where the European pack held its ground. At twelve nineteen the board pinged. I set the cup down and turned. The signal had come in on the emergency channel, the one that is only supposed to open from a phone registered inside the pack house. The name field was empty. That happens when the caller is too frightened to hold still long enough for the registry to read them. The location field filled in a moment later, and I read it twice before I believed it. Luna wing. Sub-level two. The locked corridor. Nobody goes into the Luna wing. Not the warriors, not Nadia, not Cem, not me. The wing is sealed between Luna candidates, and there had been no Luna in the Boğaziçi Pack for eleven months, not since the last one left. Selin had arrived three weeks ago as the new candidate, and she had been given the wing and a healer's room and nothing else. The lock on that corridor answers to two people. Cem, and the woman inside it. I put my hand on the console and opened the line. "Boğaziçi rescue," I said. "Who is this?" Breathing. Fast, shallow breathing, and then a woman's voice, low, close to the mouthpiece as if she were lying on the floor with the phone against her cheek. "Emre," she said. "Is that you?" I knew the voice. Selin. The healer with the chestnut hair and the calm green eyes, the woman Cem had brought to the pack house and presented to us all with a speech about new beginnings. She had smiled at me that night and asked my name, and I had told her, and she had said, "The dispatcher. They say you never sleep." "I am here," I said. "Where are you?" "Sub-level two. The corridor past the healer's room." A pause. "The lock is still on. I cannot get out." "Who is with you?" "No one now." Her voice caught. "The code to the Luna wing is seven four one nine two. Do you have that?" I had it. I also had the cold feeling that had started in my hands and was moving up my arms. Seven four one nine two is not a code a Luna candidate is given when she arrives. It is the code the Alpha gives to a healer in an emergency, and there is only one healer in the Luna wing. "Where did you learn that code?" I said. "Someone used it tonight. Someone opened my door from the outside and stood in my room, and I heard them speaking to a man on a phone, and they said my name, and then they said another name, a name that was not mine. They said it was a mistake. They said the wrong woman was in the wing." I looked at the board. The signal was still live. Somewhere in the sealed corridor under the pack house, Selin was on the floor in the dark with a phone she should not have had, telling me that the lock on her door had been opened by someone who knew the Alpha's own code. "Stay where you are," I said. "I am coming." "You cannot come. The corridor is sealed from the outside. Only Cem can open it." I was already reaching for my coat. "Then I will find Cem." "Emre." Her voice dropped, and I had to press the phone hard against my ear to hear her. "The person who stood in my room was not a stranger. They knew the pack house. They knew the schedule. They knew my name before they opened the door." The line went dead. I stood there with the phone in my hand and the board glowing at me, and the ferry horn sounded again down on the water, and I thought of Tarik at the door saying, Call me before you do anything else. Not the Alpha. Me. I picked up my coat and ran.

I took the stairs two at a time, coat half on, the phone still in my hand. The terminal stairwell smelled of diesel and cold stone, and my footsteps came back at me off the concrete. Somewhere above me a door opened and closed. I stopped on the landing and listened. Nothing. The water, the gulls, the low hum of the generators in the basement. I had one clear thought on the way down: the corridor answers to Cem, and Cem was not in the pack house tonight. He had gone to the Council hall on the European side at eight and taken two warriors with him, and I had logged the departure myself. Which meant the lock on Selin's door had been opened by someone who knew Cem would be gone. I came out onto the ground floor and cut through the ticket hall. Ozan's chair was empty, his tea flask still on the counter, and the little radio behind it played a station from the Asian side, a man's voice reading the shipping forecast for the strait. I killed the radio. The pack house door is set into the back wall of the terminal, behind a curtain that smells of old rope. I put my hand on the scanner and it read me as Omega, and the door opened. Inside, the corridor was dark. The pack house keeps night lights burning along the floor at all hours, small green bulbs behind brass grilles, and they were out. Every one of them. I stood still in the doorway and let my eyes change. The wolf does that for me when I ask, and the corridor came up in greys and silvers, and I could see the length of it going down, and the stairwell at the end where the Luna wing was sealed. I took the stairs. Sub-level two is colder than the rest of the house. The walls down there are old ferry tile, white with a blue stripe, and the air tastes of salt. I reached the corridor and put my hand on the lock plate. It was warm. Someone had used it less than ten minutes ago, and the little display above the plate had gone dark, wiped clean. The registry had said Selin was inside. I did not need the registry now. I could smell her through the door, chestnut and clean linen and the sharp green smell of the herbs she kept in her room. Under that, faint, there was something else. A man's sweat, old, and a trace of engine oil, and a scent I almost knew. "Emre." Selin's voice came through the door, muffled, close. "You came." "You said the lock was still on." "It was. It is. Someone opened it from the outside and then closed it again." A pause. "They locked me in twice." "Step back from the door." I put my shoulder against the plate and pushed, and pack locks do not give to shoulders. I tried the override I am not supposed to use, the one every dispatcher carries in his head for a night when the Alpha is unreachable, and the display blinked amber and asked for a code I did not have. I tried seven four one nine two. The display went red. The override refused it. That was the moment my hands stopped being cold. I had heard the code from Selin's own mouth on a dead line, and the lock that Cem controls had just told me the code was wrong. Which meant the code she had whispered to me was not the code that opened her door. She had been told a number, and she had believed it, and someone had given her that number to see if she would repeat it to me. "Emre." Her voice again. "What is happening out there?" "Your code did not work." Silence. Then, quietly, "It opened my door earlier. I heard the beep. I swear to you I heard the beep." "I believe you." I stepped back from the lock and looked at the corridor, at the little camera above the stairwell that had been turned to face the wall. "The code was changed after they used it. They wanted me to try it and fail." "Why would anyone want that?" "So the record would show the dispatcher trying an Alpha code he was never given." I said it flatly. "Selin, listen to me. Who told you that number?" "The healer who came to my room three days ago. She said it was the new emergency code and that I should keep it in my head and never write it down." "There is no healer assigned to the Luna wing except you." "I know that now." Her breath went out of her in a rush. "She wore the house grey. She had the key card. She told me Cem had changed the system after the last Luna left." I leaned my forehead against the door and thought in numbers, the way I do when the calls come in fast. One, the code had been given to Selin by someone with a house key card and the grey uniform. Two, that person knew Cem would be at the Council hall tonight. Three, that person had put a phone in Selin's hand and told her to call the hotline if anything went wrong, and the hotline had recorded her whispering a false code to me. Four, whoever it was had walked out of this corridor with a clean display and a camera facing the wall, and I was standing on the wrong side of a sealed door with a red light telling me I had tried to break into the Luna wing. "I am going to need Cem," I said. "Or his override. Stay back from the door." I turned and went up the stairs, and at the top my phone buzzed in my coat pocket. A message from a number I did not have saved. No name, no greeting. Just a line of text: The board is still open. The name field is empty because she called from the pack phone, not her own. Look at what the registry wrote under her location. I read it twice. Then I went back down to the dispatch office, and the board was still glowing, and I opened the record for the twelve nineteen call and scrolled to the field I had not looked at, the one below the location. The registry had written a second line under Luna wing, sub-level two. It said: Device registered to Beta Nadia. I sat down in the chair. My hands were steady now, which is how I know when something is really bad. I put my finger on the line and read it again, and then I looked at the timestamp, and then I looked at the message on my phone, and then I did something I had never done in five years on that board. I took the record of the call and copied it into my own phone. Not the official log. A private copy, the kind that a dispatcher is not supposed to make. Then I called Cem, and his phone rang through to nothing, and I called the second warrior, and that phone rang through to nothing too. Somewhere on the water, the ferry horn sounded once, long and flat, and I thought of Tarik at the door saying, Not the Alpha. Me. I went back down to sub-level two with a chair and a length of iron pipe from Ozan's store, and I put the chair against the wall under the camera and climbed up and turned the camera back to face the corridor. Then I sat down on the floor with my back against Selin's door, and I told her through the wood what the registry had written. She was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, her voice had changed. "Emre," she said. "If the phone was Nadia's, then Nadia opened my door tonight. And if Nadia opened my door, she did not do it to hurt me. She did it to make sure I called you." I looked at the red light on the lock plate. "Why would she want that?" "Because you are the only wolf in this pack who can read that board," Selin said. "And she wanted to see what you would do with what it told you." The light on the lock plate went green.

The lock plate glowed green for three seconds. Then it beeped and the door swung inward a hand's width, and the smell of Selin came out at me, chestnut and clean linen and the green herbs she kept in jars on her window ledge. I got up off the floor and put the iron pipe down against the wall. Whatever was on the other side of that door did not need a pipe. "Stay where you are," I said. "Let me look first." The healer's room was small. A cot against one wall, a table with her jars and a mortar, a lamp turned down low. The window that looked out onto the water was barred. I had not known that. Selin sat on the cot with her back to the wall. Her wrists were tied in front of her with a length of grey packing cord, the kind Ozan uses on the ferry crates. Her chestnut hair had come down out of its clasp and hung over one shoulder. Her green eyes found mine and stayed there. "Are you hurt?" "No." She lifted her wrists. "This is all. They did not touch me." I knelt and cut the cord with my pocket knife. It was knotted twice and wet where she had been working at it with her teeth. She pulled her hands apart and flexed her fingers. "How long were you tied?" "Since a little after midnight. I heard the lock beep and stood up, and a man came in and put the cord around my wrists before I could see his face. He had a hood. He told me to sit and not speak, and then he made a phone call and said the things I told you." She rubbed her wrists. "Then he left and I heard the lock again." "Did he say anything that did not go into the phone?" She looked at the barred window. "He said, tell the dispatcher the wrong woman is in the wing. He said it twice. The second time slower, as if he wanted me to remember the exact words." A kidnapper who ties a woman to a cot and then coaches her on what to say to the rescue line is not trying to keep her. He is trying to deliver a message. I had heard the message and come running, and whoever wanted that had left a camera turned to the wall and a false code in the lock so the record would show me breaking into the Luna wing. "Who gave you the grey uniform and the key card?" I said. "The healer. She came three days ago. I did not know her. She said the Alpha had sent her because the wing needed a second pair of hands before the ceremony." "Cem did not send her. Cem has been at the Council hall since eight." "I know that now." She met my eyes again. "You think I am lying." "I think you are telling me what you were told." I stood up. "There is a difference." "Is there?" I did not answer that. I went to the door and looked at the frame, at the little recess where the lock mechanism sits. The plate had gone dark again. Someone had closed the door from the outside while I was sitting against it, and the green light I had seen was the door unlocking itself on a timer, a feature I had never known the Luna wing had. "They wanted me inside," I said. "Not you out." Selin stood up and moved carefully, as if her legs had gone numb. "Then we are both in the same trap. What is your next number?" "My next number is that I need to know who is protecting whom." I turned to face her. "You did not call the hotline on your own phone. You called it on a pack phone registered to Nadia. Nadia is the Beta. She does not lend her phone to healers." Selin's face did not change. She had a healer's stillness, the kind that comes from sitting with wolves in pain and telling them nothing that would make it worse. "I did not call from Nadia's phone," she said. "I called from the phone in my hand. It was in the room when I woke up. It was already on the line." "The line was open?" "The line was open. Someone had already dialled it. All I did was speak into it." She folded her arms. "I thought you would have seen that on your board." I had not. The registry records the device, not the hand that holds it. A phone left on a cot with the emergency channel already open would show up exactly the way that call had shown up. Someone had put a phone in Selin's room and opened the line to me and then stood in the corridor with a hood over his face and tied her up. Someone wanted a dispatcher's private record to show a call from the Beta's phone. "You are protecting someone," I said. "I am protecting myself." Her voice was quiet and flat. "I have been in this pack three weeks. I have one room, one lock and one phone that is not mine. If I name a wolf tonight, I have to live in this house tomorrow with whatever is left of the pack when the naming is done." "That is not an answer." "It is the answer I have." I looked at the cord on the floor. Her hands had not been tied tightly. A wolf of any rank could have snapped that cord. Selin was a healer with no warrior training, but she was still a wolf, and she had sat on that cot with a phone in her hand and a cord around her wrists and had not broken either. "Your hands were free enough to break this," I said, and picked up the cord. Selin looked at the cord and then at me, and for the first time her calm slipped a little at the edge. "Yes," she said. "Why didn't you?" She was quiet for a moment. Somewhere above us a door opened and closed, and the sound carried down the stairwell, and we both looked up at the ceiling. When she spoke again her voice was lower. "Because I was told that if I broke out of this room before the dispatcher came, the wolf who put me here would go after someone I love." She took the cord out of my hand and coiled it neatly. "And I believed him. So I sat still and I waited, and I said what he told me to say. Now you know as much as I do." The cold in the room had worked into my hands. "I need to get you out of this wing before Cem comes back. If the record shows you in the Luna wing with me, after midnight, with the lock opened by a code I tried to use, then you and I are both in a story we did not write." Selin picked up her boots from beside the cot and sat down to put them on. "Where would I go?" "Ozan's room. He does not ask questions and he does not log anything." I pulled my coat off and held it out to her. "Put this on. We go up the service stairs and out through the ticket hall, and if anyone stops us you are a healer called to a sick wolf in the city." She took the coat and pulled it around her shoulders. It hung past her hands, and the collar came up to her chin. She looked at me over the collar. "Emre," she said. "The man in the hood said one more thing before he left. I did not put it in my report to you because I did not know what it meant." "What did he say?" "He said, tell the dispatcher that his sister should not go walking near the water this week." The floor seemed to tilt under me. I stood very still and let the numbers come, and the numbers did not help, because the only wolf in a hood with a grey packing cord who knew Leyla's name was a wolf who had been inside this pack house tonight, and I had not seen a single face.