Chapter 9: The Fox's Game

"I don't know," I said. "I swear I don't know. Put me out the airlock if you want, but I'm telling you the truth."

Rafe's hands stayed locked on my shoulders.

His amber eyes searched my face for a lie, and I held still and let him look.

Then the wall alarm went off.

It was a different sound from the rage siren, short and sharp and repeating.

"Perimeter," Kit said, bursting through the door. "The east gate. There's a pack on the plain, at least forty, and the drones aren't up."

Rafe's grip eased.

"The drones should be patrolling," he said.

"The Warden stopped sending them out last month," Bastian said. "Nobody told us why."

Rafe let go of me.

He did not say he believed me.

He looked at Stellan's bare back, and the beads on the tray, and then at me, once more.

"This isn't finished," he said.

"No," I said. "It isn't."

He turned and ran for the gate.

I ran after Kit.

The east wall was a tall black rampart with a catwalk along the top, and when I climbed onto it the whole plain below was moving.

Storm beasts.

Dozens of them, grey and hunched, with long jaws and eyes that caught the floodlights and threw them back.

They were pressed against the gate in a wall of fur, clawing the steel, and the steel was starting to bend.

"They've never come this close," Kit said.

His fox shimmered into the air at his shoulder, red and bright, with its too many teeth.

"They smell something."

"They smell me," I said.

He looked at me.

"The one I took the trap off must have told them," I said. "I don't know how. Maybe they just know."

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