The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 32 of 32

Chapter 32: Her Own Hand

The roll keeper looked up from the page.

She didn't say anything.

She didn't have to. Four hundred people in folding chairs had gone quiet on their own.

The High Alpha, in his chair by the workbench, turned his head to look at me.

"It's been waiting," he said.

I stood up.

Warrick didn't. He stayed in his seat beside mine and kept his hands on his knees, so nobody could say he'd walked me there.

I walked across the hangar floor alone.

Past the stove table, where my mother sat very still beside the cook.

I stopped in front of the book.

Coldfoot's page lay open on the stand, soft as cloth.

A hundred years of Hollorans. A hundred years of Lunas beside them.

And the short neat stroke, and the white line after it.

I picked up the pen.

It was heavier than I expected, old silver, warm from the sun coming through the hangar door.

I'd signed a napkin with a loop and a line that didn't spell anything.

I'd written "Passenger E. Crewe" in a logbook that a man locked in a drawer.

I'd written thousands of hours in my own hand, every one of them true.

I bent over the page.

I wrote it in the block capitals I used for tail numbers, the way you write something that has to be read in bad weather.

TEAL.

Then I put the pen down and stepped back.

The ink sat there, wet and black, beside Warrick's name.

Nobody clapped.

It wasn't the kind of quiet you clap into.

Warrick got up then.

He walked across the hangar and stood beside me at the stand, and he put his big hand flat on the open page, beside my name, not on it.

"I swear on this roll," he said to the whole room, "I'll never use the voice on her. Not in danger. Not in anger. Not once."

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