Morning came with the sound of running water.
Not the hiss of a kettle or the glug of a bucket being poured, but the smooth, continuous rush of pipes and valves and things that used to be invisible. In the cabin, it came from behind the bathroom door — a steady, civilized roar.
Holt stood in the hallway staring at it like it was about to attack.
He glanced at Rime. “Water… angry,” he muttered.
Rime’s ears tipped forward, amused. “Not angry,” he said. “Just fast. Like you.”
Holt’s tail flicked nervously. “Not like me. Me louder.”
The bathroom door opened, and steam billowed out like the breath of some gentle dragon. Thane stepped through it, fur damp and fluffed in strange directions, medallion gleaming with beads of water. He’d wrapped a threadbare towel around his shoulders more out of habit than necessity.
He stopped when he saw Holt and Rime frozen in the hallway.
“What,” he said, “are you two doing?”
Holt pointed at the still-running shower beyond him. “House… leaking,” he said. “On purpose.”
“It’s a shower,” Thane said. “We’ve had showers before.”
“Drip shower,” Holt said. “Bucket shower. This… river shower. In wall.”
Rime leaned a little to look past Thane. “It is strong,” he conceded. “Louder than old days.”
“That’s because city pressure is back,” Thane said. “Water plant’s running on the dam power now. Pumps. Treatment. Whole system woke up.”
Holt blinked slowly, trying to wrap his head around that. “House drink river,” he decided. “Then spit it out.”
Thane smirked. “That’s… not completely wrong.”
From the kitchen came the whirring rattle of something else new-that-used-to-be-normal. The wolves padded toward it, claws ticking on the wooden floor.
Mark stood at the counter, staring with inappropriate reverence at the appliance humming softly in front of him.
“Is that—” Gabriel started as they entered.
“Yes,” Mark said. “That is a blender.”
On the table beside him, an old recipe book lay open, stained and dog-eared. Next to it sat a bowl of fruit rescued from a market stall that had nearly cried when the fridges came back to life: berries, a few peaches, something that might once have been a banana before the Fall and had miraculously survived in someone’s cellar.
Thane sniffed. “And what are we blending?”
“Everything,” Mark said with quiet happiness.
The blender gave a higher whine. The wolves collectively leaned back a fraction, ears flattening, not out of fear but that instinctive response to high-pitched mechanical sound.
Holt frowned. “Machine angry too.”
“It’s turning fruit into a drink,” Gabriel said. “Like chewing, but lazy and more fun.”
Holt squinted suspiciously at the appliance. “Chew machine.”
“Exactly,” Gabriel said.
The pitch dropped as Mark released the button. The blender slowed to a stop, one last glorp of blended fruit slopping against the sides.
Mark pulled the pitcher off with a little flourish, tail flicking, and poured the thick, brightly colored liquid into mismatched cups.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “Welcome to smoothies.”
Thane accepted his cup, eyeing the contents. “Don’t call it that,” he said. “It sounds like something that crawls.”
Gabriel laughed, took a sip, and closed his eyes. “Oh,” he sighed. “Oh, that’s dangerous. That tastes like a summer we didn’t get to have.”
Rime tried his carefully, tongue flicking. His ears lifted in surprise. “Sweet,” he said. “Cold. Like… berry snow.”
Holt took one gulp and nearly inhaled his cup. “More,” he said immediately.
“We share,” Mark said, but he poured him a second half-glass anyway.
Thane drank his slowly. Cold and sweet and pointless, in the best way — not survival food, not ration stew, not calories calculated against winter. Just something nice because they could.
He finished and set the cup down, watching the pack breathe in this oddly ordinary miracle.
“Full utilities,” Gabriel said, leaning back against the counter. “Running water, sewer, power. We’re basically living in the future.”
Thane snorted. “We’re living in 2010,” he said. “But I’ll take it.”
From the square down the hill came a sound he hadn’t heard in a long time: the soft, intermittent burble of sprinklers rotating in someone’s yard.
Gabriel cocked his head. “You hear that?”
“Yeah,” Thane said. “That’s the sound of some old guy somewhere muttering about water bills while he waters his grass.”
“We don’t have water bills,” Mark said.
“Give Marta an hour,” Thane said. “She’ll invent them.”
There was movement near the front door. Kade padded in from outside, a folded sheet of paper in one hand. He shook his fur out, scattering a few leftover droplets from the morning mist.
“Market starting early,” Kade said. “Everyone awake. Lights all on. Sprinklers confusing Holt’s cousins.”
“We’re making smoothies,” Gabriel announced. “Want one?”
Kade eyed the blender. “That is… new.”
“Everything is new today,” Rime said. He finished his drink and set the cup down carefully. “Feels like… whole town took big breath.”
Thane nodded once. “And now?” he said. “We see what they do with it.”
The square felt like it had grown overnight, not in size but in presence.
Shop windows glowed with steady light, not just candles and lanterns. Neon signs that had hung dead for years flickered and then steadied — a coffee cup steaming over the café door, a little green pharmacy cross over Holder Drug. Streetlights ringing the square stayed off in the bright morning, but their metal casings hummed faintly, ready.
Near the old laundromat, a crowd had gathered.
Holt froze at the edge of the square, staring.
“Why clothes tumbling in box?” he demanded.
The row of washing machines and dryers along the open door and windows thrummed and rattled, drums spinning. Inside, clothes slapped wetly against metal. Steam curled out every time someone opened a door, followed by the scent of detergent — sharp and clean, like a memory of grocery store aisles.
A woman from town — Mrs. Renner, the new schoolteacher — laughed as she watched a boy press his face nearly to the glass of one of the washers.
“They’re dancing, Jonah,” she said.
“The clothes are dizzy,” Jonah corrected.
Marta stood nearby with a clipboard, because of course she did, organizing a queue of families who had waited far too long for the simple luxury of washing everything properly.
When she spotted the wolves, she waved them over.
“Good,” she said. “You’re here. I have questions.”
“I regret walking down the hill,” Thane muttered.
Marta ignored that. “We need to talk about load management,” she said. “If we let everyone run electric heaters and dryers and every light in town at once, are we going to yank on that dam harder than it’s ready for?”
“The plant can handle it,” Mark said. “We’re well within capacity with all five units. But we don’t know what the downstream substations look like in every town. Burned breakers, bad transformers… The bigger worry is other people, not us.”
“We can still encourage not being idiots,” Gabriel said. “Tell folks not to leave every light on because it feels cool.”
Marta nodded. “All right. We’ll do it the Libby way — persuasion first. I’ll get flyers printed. Little ‘Respect the Power’ campaign.”
“We have a printer?” Holt said, eyes going wide.
“We have three now,” Marta said. “Jim found two in the hardware store basement that still work. Plug anything in today and it wakes up like Sleeping Beauty.”
Holt considered that, then brightened. “We make picture papers?” he asked.
“Posters,” Kade supplied.
“Yes. Posters.” Holt’s tail thumped. “Big wolf on them. Saying ‘Do not be dumb with power.’”
Gabriel grinned. “Honestly? That will absolutely work on this town.”
Thane folded his arms, looking around at the movement. Someone across the square opened a small coffee stand’s window and flipped a sign that lit up from behind: OPEN. The hiss of a proper espresso machine followed a moment later, and the smell of real, pressurized coffee drifted on the air.
Gabriel turned his head slowly toward the smell like a plant toward sunlight. “I take back anything bad I ever said about civilization,” he whispered.
“You said many bad things about civilization,” Varro said, appearing at his shoulder, map tube under one arm.
“I retract them all,” Gabriel said.
Varro watched the square with careful eyes, noting lines of movement, points of interest. “Power changes patrols,” he said quietly to Thane. “More lit spaces at night. Fewer shadows, but more people in the open. Easier to see trouble coming. Easier for trouble to see us.”
“Adjust the Quiet Circle,” Thane said. “We’ll add passes by any lit corner after dark. Especially the school and the dam access road.”
Varro nodded. “Already sketched,” he said, tapping his map case.
Rime had wandered to the edge of the fountain, which now not only flowed but did so with extra enthusiasm — some maintenance worker having apparently decided to test every setting. Children ran around it, sticking their hands in the spray and squealing at the cold.
One of them — the same boy who had drawn him as “Guard Wolf” — noticed Rime and ran over, holding something up.
“Look!” the boy said. “It flushes again!”
It took Rime a second to realize the child was brandishing not a weapon but a small plastic model of a toilet. He had no idea where the toy had come from — some forgotten back room, some long-lived stash — but the kid’s eyes were shining.
“You push this,” the boy said seriously, pressing a little lever, “and the water goes whoosh and everything goes away and it doesn’t come back.”
Rime blinked. “That is… good,” he said.
The kid nodded hard. “Mom says it’s the best thing that ever happened.”
“Many would agree,” Mark said dryly as he came up behind them.
Rime looked at him. “This is important to humans,” he said.
“This,” Mark said, “and refrigerators. And lights that stay on when it’s dark. And showers that don’t require carrying buckets. Running water and sewer is the difference between ‘we survived’ and ‘we live here.’”
Rime looked around at the laughing children, the busy adults, the laundry spinning in the laundromat windows, the neon signs, the coffee steam, the slight hum of transformers in the alleyways.
“Feels like… town waking up,” he said.
“It is,” Mark said. “It’s remembering itself.”
Later that afternoon, Thane walked down a side street that hadn’t seen much use since the Fall.
It was lined with modest houses, yards that had grown shaggy under the interim of survival. Now some of those yards had sprinklers ticking quietly, arcing water in neat, rhythmic fans across patches of green. A garden hose lay uncoiled on a driveway, filling a kiddie pool; two kids splashed in it, shrieking.
At one house, an old man sat on his porch with a radio balanced on the railing. Not one of the hand-crank or battery transistors they’d distributed from KLMR’s stash, but a proper, heavy, plug-in tabletop thing with a glowing dial and a warm orange pilot light.
“…you’re listening to KLMR, the voice of Libby,” came Gabriel’s voice from the speaker, bright and amused. “And if your lights are on today, you have a pack of moderately responsible werewolves to thank. And some very tired hydro turbines.”
The old man saw Thane and raised a hand. “Afternoon, Alpha,” he called.
Thane returned the nod. “Afternoon. Radio working all right?”
“Like it never stopped,” the man said. “Got my old records dusted off. I even plugged in my wife’s ugly lamp.” He gestured inside, where an abomination of fringes and floral non-choices glowed proudly in a front window.
Thane chuckled. “She like that lamp?”
“She loved that lamp,” the man said. “Never thought I’d see it lit again. Feels like she’s sitting in there, griping about my boots.”
Thane’s smile softened. “Then I’m glad it’s on,” he said.
He walked on, feeling the weight of a hundred small resurrections in every window and doorway. The hum of a refrigerator. The flick of a ceiling fan. The quiver of a TV screen someone had plugged in out of pure curiosity, now displaying nothing more than a blue void and the word NO SIGNAL — but the fact that it lit at all made the teenagers clustered around it laugh like they’d won a prize.
At the end of the street, the sewer plant sat on its little fenced plot, quietly doing its job again. Pumps whirred, aerators churned; the smell was… well, as good as a sewer plant ever got. But it meant toilets flushed and drains drained and disease had one less foothold.
Normal.
Or close enough.
Evening settled slowly, like the town wasn’t quite done showing off yet.
In the cabin, Gabriel stood at the open kitchen window with his guitar, playing to the square below. He’d dragged an extension cord out earlier to plug in a battered little amp they’d found in the back of the old music store. It hummed and buzzed and occasionally crackled, but it carried his chords across the clearing.
Holt sat on the floor with a stack of paper and a fistful of markers, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth in fierce concentration. The top page showed a very large, very toothy wolf pointing at a glowing lightbulb.
Underneath, in huge block letters, Holt had written (with some spelling help from Kade): DO NOT BE DUMB WITH POWER.
Rime sat across from him, carefully inking in the lettering on another poster: a paw resting gently on a little drawn dam with waves around it. PROTECT THE HEART, it said.
Kade leaned over Varro’s shoulder at the table, both of them bent over an updated map of Libby. Varro had marked streets with little dots where streetlights stood, circled key buildings that now had reliable power — the school, the clinic, City Hall, the phone exchange, KLMR’s studio.
“The Quiet Circle gets one extra leg here,” Varro said, drawing a line that looped past the school and down toward the river. “And another pass by the dam road turnoff. We want eyes on anyone who might be heading that way for reasons that aren’t official.”
“And we rotate who walks the circle,” Kade said. “So everyone knows every lit corner.”
“Good,” Thane said from his spot by the fire.
He was half-sitting, half sprawled in his favorite chair, a mug of actual hot tea on the side table instead of the usual chipped water jug. The electric kettle had fascinated Holt for a full five minutes earlier. “It makes water hot fast,” Holt had declared. “Like small angry storm.”
Gabriel shifted songs, drifting into something soft and simple. Not a broadcast performance, not a big moment, just a tune to sit with at the end of a long day.
“You know what I missed the most?” he asked, not looking up from his strings.
“Coffee,” Mark said from the corner, where he sat with a book and a little clip-on reading light that no longer needed batteries.
“Okay, second most,” Gabriel said.
“Hot show—” Holt started.
“Careful,” Rime warned.
Holt re-routed. “Warm… rain in house,” he finished proudly.
“The sound,” Gabriel said. “Not just of machines. Of… this.” He gestured vaguely with the neck of the guitar. “People doing pointless stuff because they can. Sprinklers. Blenders. Kids playing with noisy toys that would’ve gotten them throttled last year because batteries were life.”
“World busy again,” Holt said.
“Busy in different way,” Rime added.
Thane watched them all. If he listened hard, he could pick out all the layers: the hum of the fridge, the faint buzz of the porch light outside, the far-off whisper of town transformers feeding light down streets. Under it, the river, the forest. The old world and the new one, braided.
He took a breath.
“This is what we were aiming for,” he said quietly.
The room’s noise softened a fraction, attention drifting his way.
“Not just surviving,” he went on. “Not just fighting the next raid, fixing the next pipe, patching the next roof. Actual… life. Normal days. Stupid arguments about whose laundry is in the machine too long.”
“That is my laundry,” Varro said automatically.
Kade snorted. “It is always your laundry.”
“All right, see?” Gabriel said. “We’re already there.”
They laughed.
Thane turned his mug in his hands, watching the steam curl.
“World fell,” he said. “We clawed our way out. We built a radio voice. We strung copper and lit phones. We made peace with wolves and humans both. Today…” He gestured vaguely toward the window and the glowing town beyond it. “Today the toilets flushed and the traffic lights worked and somebody’s ugly lamp came back on. That’s not nothing.”
“It is everything,” Mark said softly.
Rime leaned his elbows on his knees. “You like this,” he said to Thane. “Noise. Lights. Busy town.”
Thane considered that.
“I like that they had a choice,” he said. “To turn it on. To leave it off. To stand under a streetlight or sit in the dark by a fire. Power’s just a tool. What matters is what they do with it.”
Holt nodded sagely. “We do not be dumb with power,” he said, tapping his poster.
“Exactly,” Thane said.
Gabriel let the last chord ring and fade. Outside, the square glowed like a small constellation. Somewhere near City Hall, the schoolhouse windows shone — tomorrow, the kids would come in to fully lit classrooms for the first time, not just strings of battery lanterns.
“Normal, again,” Gabriel said quietly.
Thane’s ears flicked. “Careful,” he said. “You jinx it, I’ll send you to guard the dam alone for a week.”
Gabriel grinned. “Worth it.”
They fell into a comfortable silence — the kind that came not from exhaustion but from something like contentment. The sort of quiet that lived under conversation, not instead of it.
Outside, a streetlight flickered once, as if testing itself, then burned steady.
Downriver, unseen, turbines turned. Water roared through penstocks, generators hummed, and the dam did its patient, tireless work.
In Libby, a boy fell asleep with his bedside lamp on because he could, clutching a toy car that drove without needing a hand crank. An old man dozed in the glow of his wife’s ridiculous lamp. A schoolteacher sat at a real desk, writing tomorrow’s lesson plans under a proper ceiling light.
In the cabin, the pack rested. Not because they were waiting for the next fight, but because they’d done enough for one day, and normal life had finally shown up to share the load.
Thane took one more look out the window at the town, at the way the light touched the edges of everything, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
Normal. For tonight, at least.
He thought of the dark years, of generators coughing and dying, of candles and fear and the endless, awful quiet after the Fall.
Then he listened to the fridge hum, Gabriel’s fingers idly plucking a soft pattern as he tuned, Holt muttering “no dumb with power” under his breath as he colored in the claws on his poster, Kade and Varro arguing quietly about patrol paths, Rime simply breathing steadily at the edge of it all like a low, steady guard line.
“Yeah,” Thane murmured to himself.
“Normal again.”