hunger – of a drone. It was hungry, yes, as they all were, but not starving. Its status among its kind guaranteed that it was nourished. It looked with sentience and malice.
Part of her mind – the remorseless, scientific part that she could never put at rest despite her fear – identified its subspecies. Canis lupus occidentalis, her mind told her.
And then it talked.
“Surrender,” the wolf said. It had the same strange voice that they all had, hoarse and staccato. She was certain that the damned thing smiled as it addressed her.
Her reflexes were as fast as the rest of her. She fired her shotgun. She’d brought her weapon up as fast as she could, pulled the trigger without pausing to aim. The air before her exploded in sound, and one of her Squadsmen – Sheila, a younger girl – shrieked and fell to the ground because her Captain’s shot had been fired too close to her left ear. But when the smoke cleared and Sheila, cupping her ear, managed to stifle her screams, all that was left in the lieutenant’s place were two pine trees and empty space between them. One tree’s bark had been stripped away by metal. Of the wolf, there was nothing.
It talked, and it got away.
There was more.
“Captain?” Owens asked. “Captain, stand down!” He brought to her another concern. “Ma’am! Where is Caleb?”
They found Caleb 120 feet back. He hadn’t kept pace. He had always been the weakest of her Squad, but seldom the slowest. He’d been slow tonight, as it turned out.
They knew this because his throat had been removed. They found him flat on his back, beneath a swath of yellow wildflowers that bloomed even at night, where a wolf drone had silently overtaken him during her Squad’s withdrawal. The wildflowers almost matched his blond hair.
He had glazed, sad eyes and little left of his neck beyond its spinal cord and some connective tissue. The arteries of what remained of his lower neck fed a wet, dark patch on the forest floor. They made great dark drops across the spade-shaped, green lower leaves of the wildflowers.
Rebecca had endangered her Squad. She had wounded one of her own Squadsmen herself. She had lost a skilled field surgeon. In Caleb, she had also lost a childhood friend.
She was bereaved. She was confused. The trembling in her hands returned, and she realized that she was terrified.
There was a time, Rebecca’s father had told her, when wolves could not speak. She wished for that time.
Today was her birthday. She was 33.
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