Chapter 13: The Map

"What others?" I asked.

"She wouldn't say." Emmett set the plate in the rack. "She says she'll only tell you."

Rue went flat in my chest with her ears back.

"Then she can keep it," I said.

I meant it for a week.

Every night that week Josie slept on my chest, and every night I lay awake doing the math.

The brown book's count came out the same every night.

That left two buyers walking around somewhere with a wolf that wasn't theirs.

And Mira hadn't said the other two. She'd said the others.

On the twenty-seventh I left Josie with my father and crossed the lower bridge with Dagny.

"You don't have to come in," I told her in the truck.

"I'm writing it down," she said. "I can't write down a closed door."

Her broken finger was in a splint, taped to the one beside it.

She'd learned to hold the pen with the other three.

Emmett met us on the clinic porch.

He didn't say anything about the week. He just looked at me to see if I was sure.

I nodded, and he opened the door to the back room.

It was a small room with a narrow bed and a window full of pine trees.

Mira was sitting up with a tray on her knees.

She looked about fifteen.

Her black bob had grown out shaggy. Her fingertips were healing pink where the nails were coming back.

Her eyes were brown. Just brown.

She looked at me and then at the tray.

"I thought you'd bring the baby," she said.

"No."

"I wouldn't have touched her."

"I know you wouldn't," I said. "You'd have had to get past me."

Dagny took the chair by the window and opened her notebook.

Mira glanced at her.

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