They left before the sun decided what color it wanted to be.
Hank clasped Thane’s forearm at the gate, fingers tight with the kind of friendship that didn’t need saying. “One week,” he said. “You don’t check in by then, I bring the whole town north on my back.”
“You’ll bring two deputies and a bad attitude,” Thane rumbled, gravel-soft. “Keep Libby breathing.”
Marta stood nearby with a folded map and a steady gaze. “You come back,” she said. “All three.” She didn’t ask; she commanded the way mountains do.
Gabriel made a show of patting his pockets. “I brought my good jokes. And the worse ones. In case diplomacy fails.”
Mark cinched his radio pack and looked to the ridge, antenna catching the first shy light. “Signal’s still pulsing. North by northwest. Past the Yaak River, beyond Highway 508. Remote enough that even the old world had to lean in to hear itself.”
Thane touched the medallion at his throat—wolf head, small and bright. Across from him, Gabriel’s matching pendant flashed once like a secret answering another secret. Then the three turned their backs on Libby and let the forest take them.
The road dwindled; the trees did not. Pines rose in solemn ranks, a green cathedral with sermons written in resin and wind. Frost clung in the shadows despite spring’s insistence. The wolves moved in a pattern that made sense to bodies built for it: Thane cutting trail, Gabriel ranging a wide arc, Mark reading the invisible music of frequencies and sky.
By noon they found the first scar of what had been: a truck swallowed to its wheel wells by moss, dashboard a terrarium of ferns, a child’s sticker on the glove box blurred by rain until the cartoon barely remembered being a face. Farther on, a logging spur split off and then disappeared under decades of needles in only a few years.
“Welcome to Yaak,” Mark murmured as the forest thinned around a cluster of leaning buildings. “Population: stubborn.”
The town had once been more rumor than place, a scatter of cabins and a bar where the river bent and argued with rock. Now it lay like a postcard left too long in the sun. Roofs sagged. Windows squinted. A hand-painted sign that had said YA AK lost its second letter to wind and a bored knife.
They crossed the empty main track and climbed a ridge that had grown a radio tower like a thorn. Half collapsed, it still threw a shadow across the clearing. Solar panels propped at odd angles gleamed with mud and neglect. Wires ran under a rusted door to a shed that didn’t feel empty.
Gabriel sniffed. “Somebody lives in this mess. Or lived in it yesterday.”
Mark knelt by a junction box, claws careful. He traced a bypass that would have made an electrician cry and Thane nod. “Not human-level slapdash,” he said, quietly impressed. “Someone who understands load and loss. Someone who can do math with their teeth.”
Thane looked to the tree line. The hair along his spine lifted in a way that had nothing to do with cold. “We’re watched.”
The radio answered for the trees. On Mark’s receiver, the green pulse fattened. The screen bled block letters in a halting cadence.
WELCOME, PACK.
WE SEE YOU.
THE LIGHT SURVIVES.
COME TO US.
Gabriel blew out a slow breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “Okay. Friendly-ish. Or hungry.”
“Both can smile,” Thane said.
He stepped to the tower and set his hands on a twisted cross-brace. Metal groaned like a sleeping animal. He lifted—slow, controlled—until the angle changed, until the tower’s broken shoulder found purchase against a supporting strut and held. Not whole, but truer.
“Why?” Gabriel asked softly, though he knew.
“So they see what we choose to keep,” Thane said.
The answer came on the wind. A low ripple. Brush whispering with feet. Not prey. Not human.
Wolves stepped from the timber: five first, then eight, then more in a widening crescent. They weren’t Libby wolves. Their fur wore the forest’s poverty—patchy in places, burrs threaded like crude jewelry, ribs a little too easy to count. Their eyes were bright and hard, unblinking with the economy of predators who hadn’t wasted movement on curiosity in years.
One broke the line and came forward, white-gray fur mapped with old scars, one ear nicked to a ragged half. She bore no clothing beyond a utility strap hung with two tools: a hand radio and a coil of line. She stopped three body lengths away.
“Brother,” she said in the old tongue, the one that lived under language. It wasn’t a word so much as a shape of throat and breath that meant of our kind, of our fight.
Thane inclined his head, full solemnity. “Sister.”
Her gaze tracked from Thane to Gabriel—black fur, jeans, the small medallion—then to Mark with his antenna and patient eyes. “You smell like human towns and hot metal,” she said in common speech that sounded learned rather than inherited. “You keep lights.”
“We keep people,” Gabriel said, humor gone gentle. “Lights help.”
She looked at him a long moment, as if weighing the shape of a joke against the memory of hunger. “You answered the call.”
“It answered us,” Mark murmured, tapping his receiver. “Someone built the call.”
Another wolf eased from the group, younger, leaner, eyes like knives. “We built the call,” he said. “To find what survives. To measure threat.”
Gabriel’s grin showed a flash of fang. “And we came with coffee and manners.”
The white-gray female’s mouth tilted, not a smile but the idea of one. “I am Sable,” she said. “Alpha here. What’s left of here.”
“Thane,” Thane said. “Gabriel. Mark.” He didn’t give last names; last names belonged to mailboxes and city councils and a world where forms needed filling. The forest didn’t care what paper said you were.
Sable’s ear flexed toward the tower. “You keep that upright,” she said. It wasn’t quite a question.
“As we keep other things upright,” Thane said.
Her gaze cut to the tree line. Three more wolves emerged, dragging a makeshift sled. On it lay a bundle of cables, a laptop whose casing had been scraped to bare metal, and a small turbine rotor—salvage that could have been hope or trap. They laid it in the shadow of the tower like tribute at a cairn.
“We keep lights too,” the young male said, chin lifted. “We keep them for us.”
“For us,” another wolf echoed, more hiss than word. The tension smelled like wet iron and old argument.
Mark’s ears angled. He spoke with the respectful curiosity that had saved his life as often as Thane’s claws. “You stitched a bear,” he said, not accusing, simply true.
Sable didn’t flinch. “We practice,” she said. “On what survives.”
“Why?” Thane asked.
“Because no one practiced on us,” Sable said. “And we still live.”
A murmur went through her pack—agreement braided with shame. Gabriel’s hackles lifted a fraction. “There’s a difference between surviving and making monsters.”
Sable’s eyes looked older than her bones. “We learned that line, yes. Some would erase it.”
The young male—his shoulders webbed with fresh scabs from a fight that had decided nothing—snarled. “Humans are a disease,” he said. “They made the virus and the wires and the cages. We should take what they had and keep it.”
Gabriel stood easier than he felt. “We keep people.”
The young male stepped, eager to show teeth. Sable’s growl cut the air in a flat sheet. He halted like he’d just remembered gravity.
“We called you to test,” Sable said to Thane. “We want to see which kind you are.”
Thane’s posture didn’t change. He could have filled the clearing with threat; he chose not to. “The kind that keeps,” he said. “Not just lights. The kind that keeps promises.”
Sable’s eyes moved again to the tower, to the angle Thane had corrected. “You can lift,” she said. “Can you hold?”
“Longer than hunger,” Thane said.
The standstill stretched. Mark could feel the radio’s heartbeat against his ribs. The letters crawled across his screen again, overlapping their breaths:
TEST OF TRUST BEGINS AT DUSK.
Mark angled the display so only Thane and Gabriel could see. Gabriel’s mouth twitched. “They text in prophecies.”
“Efficient,” Mark said.
Sable lifted her muzzle, scenting the wind, and then made a small motion with one paw. The circle widened. Two wolves brought forward a crate with a wheezing generator and a bundle of fuel lines. Another team dragged a snapped antenna element. They were staging a trial. Not a fight. A demonstration.
“Show us,” Sable said simply. “Fire. Light. Without breaking.”
Thane stepped to the generator. It was a Frankenstein of brands and eras, pieces grafted where they fit. He checked the oil, sniffed the fuel, traced the lines, and found the choke by the way it wanted to be found. He pulled the cord once—gentle, a request. Nothing. Twice—firmer. The third pull was a conversation, not a demand. The engine coughed and then settled into a rough, workable hum.
Mark had already knelt by the antenna, hands honest on metal. He set the mast against the tower’s brace, lashed it with a line, climbed two rungs and then another, weight flowing into wrists and ankles that preferred keyboards to ladders but understood necessity. Gabriel fed him the cable, claws careful, expression bright with pride he didn’t bother to hide.
“Ready,” Mark said. He tightened a coupling like he was telling a joke only the sky would get.
Thane raised a hand without looking, and Gabriel flipped the generator’s breaker. Power jumped in the cable, ran up the mast, and the battered tower shivered. A moment later the repeater’s indicator winked green. On Mark’s receiver, the pulse became a clear line.
HELLO.
LINKED.
The evening deepened around them, the forest holding its breath while one thin, stubborn strip of humanity remembered how to glow. Sable watched without moving, but her pack leaned forward in increments they didn’t think anyone could see.
The young male couldn’t bear the stillness. He lunged—not at throats, but at the generator’s cable, claws out to slice the cord that fed the tower’s new life.
Gabriel met him halfway, a black arc of motion, and caught his wrist—not breaking, not tearing, just stopping in a way that explained the word no to bones. He twisted, gentle as a teacher forcing a stubborn lock, and set the young wolf on his side without humiliation.
“Careful,” Gabriel said, voice low, amused and warning at once. “We’re playing with sharp things.”
The pack hissed, a ripple of almost-attack. Sable didn’t move. Thane did. He stepped between the generator and the agitation, nothing flashy—no roar, no slash, no swagger. He simply stood, and all that weight of will settled on the clearing like snow that chose where gravity worked.
“Enough,” Sable said.
The young male lay panting, eyes wild, then focused. He saw the cable still whole, the tower still lit, the way Thane stood without shaking and Gabriel’s hand didn’t tremble. Shame flushed his ears dark. He rolled to his knees and backed away.
Sable’s gaze flicked over her wolves and then back to Thane. “You held.”
Thane nodded once. “We hold. We mend. We don’t break what people need.”
She considered that like a new tool. “Humans?” she asked softly, the word edged like something that had cut her.
“Humans are loud,” Gabriel said. “Messy. Necessary.” He tilted his head. “So are we.”
Mark climbed down and brushed dust from his hands. “If you want, we can stabilize the array. It will hold better in weather.”
A wolf with a torn muzzle laughed once, a bark of disbelief. “He offers gifts like we are neighbors.”
“We might be,” Mark said. “Or we might be problems for each other. Both require infrastructure.”
Sable’s mouth did that almost-smile again. “You talk like rain falling on circuits,” she said to Mark, not unkind. Then to Thane: “Some of mine would come south. To learn. To test you. Others would take. I cannot undo who they became when winter had teeth.” She tipped her head. “So I make them see something bigger than teeth.”
“Fire,” Thane said.
“Discipline,” she corrected, which was another kind of fire.
The test concluded without a formal end. The generator idled, the tower held its own shadow. Wolves bled back into trees in twos and threes, glances thrown over shoulders like knots tied in string to find the way back to a thought.
Sable stayed. “You will go south,” she said. Not a question.
“Yes,” Thane said.
“You will not bring many here,” she said. Also not a question.
“Not unless invited,” Thane said.
Sable looked past them, past the tower and the town bones, to a sky that remembered more stars than names. “Some of mine will follow you,” she said. “I will not stop them. I want to see if the stories you keep are stronger than the ones hunger wrote in their bones.”
Gabriel’s ears twitched. “If they come wrong—”
“They will learn wrong hurts,” Sable said simply.
Silence stretched—an understanding laid like a plank between two cliffs.
Sable stepped closer to Thane, close enough to scent the truth of him, the long road and the shorter, softer road he had chosen. “Brother,” she said in the old tongue again, but this time it meant the one who remembers how to say no to himself.
Thane inclined his head. “Sister.”
She turned and melted into the dark, her pack folding after her until the clearing held only three wolves and the tower’s thin electric hum.
Mark powered the generator down and checked the lashings one last time. “It’ll hold a few storms,” he said. “Long enough to mean something.”
Gabriel blew a breath out and let his shoulders drop. “I wanted to like them,” he admitted. “I still might. But I’m fine with them being a little afraid of us.”
“They should be,” Thane said, not cruel, just true. He looked north where the forest turned into deeper shadow, where the road forgot the idea of pavement and the ridges forgot the idea of mercy. “Fear can be a fence.”
On his receiver, Mark watched the line stabilize, then a new pulse ride it like a hawk finding a warm updraft.
HELLO, LIBBY.
WE SEE YOUR LIGHT.
He showed it to them. Gabriel’s grin broke wide for the first time that day. “They named us.”
Thane turned south. “Let them come,” he said, voice low and certain. “They’ll find a pack worth fearing.”
They moved through the trees with night rising around their knees, two medallions cold against fur, claws silent on needle-damp earth. Behind them, the tower’s lamp blinked like a patient lighthouse. Ahead, the road narrowed and then became a path and then became a promise: bring fire. Bring discipline. Bring home what you can.
Morning would find Libby waiting with questions and work and coffee rationed to ceremony. And somewhere in the timber between, eyes would watch with curiosity sharpened by caution.
The world had fallen. The pack hadn’t.
And now, even the north knew their names.