The human registration line started at a side door and went down a hall that smelled like wet stone and floor wax.
I had been in it for an hour and nobody had said my name. That was the plan. That was the whole plan.
There were cooks and stable hands and a woman with flour still on her sleeves.
We all had something in common, and it wasn't our personalities.
Doyle: Keep your eyes forward and your mouth shut. It's a list, not a trial.
Maeve: Feels like a trial. Just with worse lighting.
Perrin stood beside me in her nice cardigan and didn't touch me, which was normal.
Then she did something not normal. She caught my wrist and squeezed it hard.
Perrin: Just say yes to whatever he asks and don't add anything. Please.
Her fingers were warm. For two seconds I was a person with a sister.
At the front of the hall, a thin man read names out of a ledger the size of a suitcase.
Gray hair, round glasses, ink all over his fingers. Wendell. The clerk who had found me.
Wendell: Name. Claimed or unclaimed.
The woman in the apron said her Alpha signed for her, and Wendell put a mark by her name and waved her on.
She almost cried from relief. I watched her go and wished I had an Alpha of my own.
The ones with a claim got a mark on the back of the hand and a line through their name.
Two of the ones without got walked to a door at the end of the hall. They didn't come back.
Roderick stood by the clerk's table with his hands behind his back and hadn't looked at me once.
That was supposed to be my safety net.
Wendell: Maeve.
Just the first name, like the envelope. Like the whole keep already knew which Maeve.
Maeve: That's me.
Wendell: No pack name. No family claim. Is that right?
He said it to the page, not to me. Then he looked up, over my head, right at my father.
Roderick could have said one word. Mine. Household. Kin.
Doyle shifted his feet. Perrin's hand went to her earring and she studied the wall like it had a window in it.
Maeve: I live in his house. I've lived there my whole life.
Wendell: I asked the Alpha's officer, not you.
And Roderick said nothing. Not one single word.
Doyle: Fuck.
He said it low, just for himself. Then he shut his mouth too, because that's what this family does.
Wendell: Unclaimed. I'll mark it.
The pen scratched. My name got a line through it and a little dot beside it, and something cold went down the back of my neck.
Perrin looked at me then. Half a second. Then she turned her head and looked away at her own hands.
That was the moment I understood. I wasn't on a list. I was over a line.
A guard stamped the back of my hand with cold ink and moved me along with the rest of the unclaimed.
I looked back once. Roderick was already talking to the clerk about something else.
I told myself my life was still waiting for me. The laundromat, the ticket, Jory counting days with me.
But I could still hear that pen scratching, and it sounded like a door shutting somewhere I couldn't get to.