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In the cell next to Sarah’s, canine toenails click back and forth across the floor. She can hear breathing, low dogbelly panting, the shush-whisper of fur. Sarah leans close to the grate. She says: “Helena?”
The wolf hurls itself against the grate and snarls; Sarah scrambles back to the other side of her cell, watches as the wolf that is her sister goes back to pacing around its cell. She jumps onto the bed, turns three times in a circle, lies down. Her ears are flattened back against her head.
“Helena,” Sarah says. “I know you can turn back. I need you to talk to me, alright? I need to know you’re okay, what – what they did to you in here, how long you’ve been—”
Helena’s eyes slit shut. Sarah gets no response, no matter how long she keeps banging on the grate.
They dump in a tray of food for Sarah, and a big slab of raw meat for Helena. The man with the tray makes a sneering comment about bitches, and Sarah snarls at him – but can’t manage anything with the grate between them. Helena, in the cell next to her, just rips her meat to pieces. Her head and tail are down and tucked close, and Sarah doesn’t know what that means. Submission, probably. Some alpha wolf shit. The first time Sarah saw Helena like this, Helena’s posture was huge – she pinned Sarah to the ground and licked her throat, didn’t bite down.
Now she’s smaller. Like a dog. Sarah chokes down dry rice and bangs the grate with her fist. “You sit when they tell you to?” she says.
She gets a low growl in response, but Helena doesn’t look up from the meat.
“Roll over,” Sarah tells her. “Beg.”
Helena growls lower and then throws herself at the grate again. It leaves diamond-shaped marks on her face, and the metal of it tears at the skin of her muzzle; she backs off whining, circles back, lets out a long yowling sound that ripples through octaves and makes the hair on the back of Sarah’s arms stand up.
“Bad dog,” she says. Helena roars. “Bad dog,” Sarah says, and Helena is pressed right up against the grate, and Sarah takes a step back and she’s fine. Those teeth are like small knives and she’s completely fine – her heart doesn’t know it, her heart is a motor tripping itself up into her throat.
“Bad dog!” she yells. “Bad dog!” Helena is screaming, a horrible feral sound. Sarah keeps yelling, even though her throat is going hoarse – and after the hurricane of sound builds past the point of tolerance, Sarah can hear her own voice yelling “I am not your dog!”
She stops yelling. She throws herself onto the ground on her side of the grate. Helena is crouched there, face bloody, naked and smeared with dirt and twitching her muscles in ways human muscles shouldn’t go.
“Thank Christ,” Sarah breathes. “There you are.”
She can only keep Helena for periods of a few minutes at a time; it seems like an enormous effort, because Helena spends the whole time shaking. She hasn’t spoken in any more full sentences, just garbled fragments of almost-words.
“How long have you been down here?”
“Three. Moon.”
“Weeks?”
Helena makes a noise that is something like gawlwargh.
“What are they doing to you?”
“Tests.”
“Do you have a plan? Helena? Do you know how we’re gonna get out of here?”
“We,” Helena says, and then she slumps forwards and Sarah hears the sound of her bones cracking.
“Helena,” Sarah says, over the desperate horror of the change, “we need to have a plan. Okay? Can you – I don’t know, bite a bloody guard or something—”
The wolf sits up and watches Sarah through the grate. It opens its mouth and hooks its teeth through the holes in the metal; its mouth is wide and hot-breathed and open, and it’s the only thing Sarah can see.
Sarah wakes to the sound of a hand banging on metal. “Sarah,” says Helena, and Sarah rolls over to watch her sister through the wall.
“What,” she says.
“I have plan,” says Helena. “But you won’t like it.”
Sarah is awake. “What’s the plan,” she says.
Helena hooks her fingers through the holes in the metal. “Your cell door,” she says. “Does it have window.”
Sarah looks. “Yeah.”
“Mm,” Helena says. “Mine doesn’t.” Then she goes quiet, contemplative.
“What’s your plan,” Sarah says.
Helena tells her. She’s right: Sarah doesn’t like it at all.
Sarah’s job is watching the door. If someone comes Helena leaps back onto her bunk and feigns sleep, dogtongue lolling, legs twitching as she chases invisible rabbits down nonexistent hills. When no one is there Sarah listens to the sound of Helena scratching through the wall between them. To a rat, Helena had said, a small hole is like a door.
Then she’d laughed. I eat rats, she says. And then their doors are mine.
Now she’s just scratching. Sarah keeps swallowing down the threat of vomit, over and over again. She watches the door. No one comes. “You never told me how this happened to you,” she says.
The scratching stops. Then it starts up again.
“Can’t be that you were born like this,” Sarah says, “’cause I wasn’t. Was it Tomas?”
The scratching stutters to a stop and then keeps going.
“Was it before Tomas?” Sarah says. She drums her hands against the bars on the window of her cell. She imagines it: her own self, smaller, wailing as a wolf opens its jaws wide and—
She stops imagining it. She bangs her hands hard against the bars, and the bars don’t wobble.
“Did it hurt?” she says. Laughs, a frightened husk of a sound. “Knock once for yes.”
Silence. From Helena’s cell, her tail goes thump. She starts scratching again. Sarah watches her hands shake, and then she closes her eyes and leans her head against the bars. They’re the only cold thing in the world, here in the desert ground.
The hole isn’t that big. Maybe as wide around as a mug rolled onto its side – but that makes Sarah think of S, and then her heart hurts. She’ll have to explain it. It was the only way, she imagines saying, but in her head S shakes her head and turns her back.
But at least she’ll be there. Sarah sucks breath between her teeth, lies down on her side, and shoves her arm through the hole in the wall. Her sleeve is rolled up to her shoulder, and that means she can feel the wet canine panting of Helena’s breath on her entire forearm.
She closes her eyes. “Tell me when you’re gonna—” she manages, and then Helena bites down on her arm.
She does it hard; Sarah shove her other wrist between her own teeth and bites down to keep from screaming. She’s going to have matching toothmarks, one on each arm – one set human, and one set wolf. Only one of them, she thinks, will scar.
Helena lets go, too fast, not fast enough; her teeth rip on their way out, and Sarah can feel her blood pouring down her arm. She yanks her arm back through the wall – the stone of the wall gouges her arm open, but that doesn’t matter. She looks at the huge wet ring of red teeth on her arm and feels her eyes blur wet and hot with tears. “How long,” she says. “Goddamn you, Helena, you better answer this in words, you owe me.”
From the other side of the wall, the sound of bones breaking. “Not long,” Helena says. “I can stay with you. Until it happens.”
Sarah stands up on shaking legs from the ground, stumbles over to the window in her cell. Outside the moon is rising. It’s full. Not long now; she stumbles back over to the wall and sits down. There’s a tug at the fabric of her pants, and she looks down to see Helena’s hand shoved through the hole in the wall. Helena curls her fingers into the fabric of Sarah’s pants, and Sarah fumbles a hand down and grabs Helena’s fingers in hers.
“You’re sure I’ll be able to jump through it,” she says. “I don’t – how am I even gonna know how to move.”
“You will know,” Helena says. “You will jump. You will break the bars. And then you will open my door. And then we will run, and I will show you how to make it hurt less, and also how to catch rabbits and tear them open with your teeth.”
Sarah’s body aches, like she’s slowly catching the flu. She plants both feet on the ground, rests her head against her folded knees. “Oh god,” she says. “Oh god.”
“Shh,” Helena says.
“Tell me I’m gonna be fine,” Sarah says.
“You will be something,” Helena says. She’s silent, for a minute. “If you are lucky maybe you will like it.”
“I’m not gonna – unh,” Sarah says, shaking. “I. I’m not. I’m not a monster. I’m not.”
Helena continues to be quiet. Her fingers twitch against Sarah’s, like she’s trying to be soothing but doesn’t quite know how it goes. “You weren’t,” she says. “But I think you are now.”