MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

MARCO

The north wall is going to be finished by Friday.

I stand on the scaffolding at the east corner with the morning cold working through my coat and I watch my crew lay the upper parapet course, and I do the math in my head for the fourth time since sunrise. Materials against days. Days against hands. Hands against Friday.

The answer has not changed since the first time. It never does. I run it again anyway, because running it gives my hands something to hold while I think, and I have never once thought well without something to hold. Corvin learned that about me thirty years ago. It is why he gives me folders in meetings even when he already knows I have memorized the contents.

Friday. Three days. The last section of the upper parapet. The new sensor line along the outer base. The reinforced gate mechanism that the original installation never had — because when the original gate went up, nobody in this pack had anticipated needing to hold thirty armed men at the tree line for two hours on a Tuesday afternoon.

We anticipate it now. That is what walls are. Walls are the list of everything that has already happened to you, written in stone.

I pull the small book from my breast pocket and make a note. Parapet course 4 of 5. Sensor line Thursday. Gate mechanism Friday morning, test Friday noon.

I have kept a small book in this pocket for thirty-one years.

The first one Corvin gave me the week he made me Beta. A plain brown thing, nothing to it, except that on the inside cover he had written my name in his own hand, and under it one line: Write down what matters. You will not always be able to tell in the moment. I have gone through forty-seven books since. The old ones sit in a box in my quarters. I have never once gone back and read one.

I keep them anyway. Some things you keep the way you keep the memory of the day a man you respect told you, without saying it in those words, that you were trusted.

I think about Corvin.

I have been thinking about him more than usual these last weeks, and not because of Victor, and not because of the wall, and not because of any line item I could put in a report. I have been thinking about him the way you think about a man you have watched for thirty years, when thirty years of watching has taught you the difference between a man having a hard season and a man running out of something.

I do not say this to anyone.

It is not my place, and I have no proof, and I do not deal in things I cannot put a number beside. But I watch him at the morning briefings. I watch how much of his plate goes back to the kitchen. I watch the way he takes the stairs now, still strong, still first, but with a half-beat at the landing that was not there a year ago. I watch him carry the Freya matter and the Cole matter and the Victor matter and the whole freight of this pack, and there is a quality to the carrying that is different.

Not weakness. I want to be precise, even inside my own head, because precision is the only prayer I know. Nothing Corvin does is weakness. It is the quality of a man who is spending more than he is taking in, and has been for long enough that the deficit has started to show at the edges.

I make another note. Not about Corvin. I do not write about Corvin. I write, order additional lamp oil for the east corridor, because the hand wanted to write something and the truth was not available to it.

"Beta!" Tomas, down at the base, one hand shading his eyes. "Sensor line — calibrate to the old wall standard or the new spec?"

I lean over the scaffolding rail. "New spec. Full sensitivity. If a rabbit crosses that field at midnight, I want a report on the rabbit."

"That’ll flag every rabbit in the territory!"

"Then we will know our rabbits," I call down. "Get it done."

He laughs and turns back to his crew, and the crew bends back to the work, and the wall gains another few inches of its repair, stone by stone, the way everything real gets built — slowly, by people whose names never make it into anyone’s report.

I stand in the cold and watch them and let myself think the thought I have been circling all morning.

The worst is probably over.

Victor pulled his men back and has not been seen in three weeks. Rowan held that wall alone at an age when his father was still learning to hold his temper. Ryker came home in time, which is the only schedule Ryker has ever kept. Cole is gone, and the pack grieves him in the quiet way of people who know a thing was right without ever once confusing right with easy. Freya is contained in the east wing. Jason is in the dungeon healing slowly under a guard rotation Rowan just tightened, which tells me the boy noticed the same thing I noticed. Amaris is safe inside these walls, and the Alpha smiles at breakfast now, which is a sentence I never expected to think in this lifetime.

The worst is probably over.

I take the small book back out and I write that down. The full sentence. The worst is probably over.

Not as a conclusion. I have been Beta of this pack for thirty-one years and I have buried too many conclusions to trust one on a Tuesday. I write it down as a thing I want to be true badly enough to put it in the book — because the man who gave me the first book told me to write down what matters, and what matters this morning, on this scaffolding, in this cold, is that for the first time since a black car parked itself in our tree line, I can stand on this wall and want something quietly and believe I might get it.

I close the book. I slide it back into the breast pocket, over the heart, where it has ridden for thirty-one years.

I look at the wall.

Stone by stone. Course by course. Friday.

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