Chapter 5 WHAT WOLVES EAT FOR LUNCH

ZOE POV

Pack Dynamics meets in room 214, second floor east wing, eight AM sharp. I find it by following a cluster of students who all move with the same particular quality of ease — the ease of people who've never had to consider whether a room wants them in it.

I consider it at the door. Then I walk through anyway.

Professor Osvik is mid-sentence when I enter, something about territorial boundary precedent in the 1987 Accord revisions, and he stops. Not a pause. A stop. Like someone cut the audio.

The entire class turns.

I count fourteen students before I stop counting and pull out my notebook instead.

"She's human."

The girl who says it is blond, sharp-featured, sitting in the third row. She doesn't whisper it. She says it the way you'd say there's a wasp in here — informational, faintly appalled, expecting someone to handle it.

I uncap my pen. I write Pack Dynamics at the top of the first page. I underline it once.

Osvik recovers faster than I expect. He's older, sixties maybe, with the watchful quality of someone who has learned to be very still around things that move quickly. He continues the sentence he dropped, picks it back up from the subordinate clause, and doesn't look at me again for the entire ninety minutes. I notice this. I also notice that he calls on every other student at least once — drilling cases, testing precedent recall, Socratic and relentless — and skips me every single time. Not accidentally. The skip has a shape to it, a small deliberate swerve, like driving around a pothole you've memorized.

He's not strategically interested in me the way Idris is, or frightened of what I represent the way Callum was at dinner. He's unsettled. Genuinely. Like I'm a variable that shouldn't be in the equation and he hasn't decided yet what my presence means for the proof.

I take four pages of notes. The class is actually interesting, which I resent a little.

Neve has claimed a table in the dining hall's far southeast corner, back against the wall, sight lines to both doors. She pats the seat beside her when she sees me coming and pulls her tray over to make room with the efficiency of someone who has thought about this seating arrangement.

"Okay," she says, before I've even put my food down. "I've been waiting to do this all morning. Are you ready?"

"For what?"

"The tour." She nods at the room.

I look. The dining hall is enormous, vaulted ceiling, long tables arranged in a pattern I'd read as random before now. It isn't random.

"Dray pack," Neve says, tipping her chin toward the tables nearest the north windows. "You see how they sit? Back to the room, all of them. Alpha instinct — dominant pack doesn't expose its spine. Callum's not here yet, which means he'll come in through the side door, sit at the end closest to it, and face this direction for the entire meal."

I turn, slowly, to look at the side door.

"Don't look yet, I'm not done —"

"You were right."

Neve turns. Callum has appeared at the side door, exactly as described. He moves to the end of the nearest Dray table, sits facing the room, and in the three seconds before he's occupied with his tray he looks directly at our corner.

Not at Neve.

I look back at my food.

"Farouk pack," Neve continues, undeterred. "Center tables, always. Idris likes maximum visibility. You'll notice the Farouk seats are also closest to both faculty tables — plausible deniability, but really it's so he knows what the adults are talking about." She steals a piece of bread off my tray. "Vael pack is by the east window. Soren's usually late, sits at the end where he can leave without walking past anyone."

"And everyone else?"

"Minor packs, ungrouped, fill in the rest. We" — she gestures between us — "are aggressively neutral territory. I have familial ties to the Okafor affiliate pack but they're small enough that nobody's bothered claiming me, so I claim nobody. You are the only fully human student in this building, so you don't even have that. We are, politically speaking, furniture."

"I've been called worse."

"I know." She says it without humor, which is unusual for her. Then the warmth snaps back on like a lamp. "Okay, that junior near the Farouk table — Malachai something — he's been looking at you for six minutes. Don't look. He lost a territory bet last week and he's trying to make it back through points."

"Points."

"Social currency. Pack-adjacent. Don't ask how it works yet, it'll make your eye twitch." She leans in. "Point is, right now you're worth points to people who know nothing about why you're actually here. Which makes you valuable for the wrong reasons to people with no power, and valuable for the right reasons to people with too much of it."

I eat my lunch. I think about the folder labeled VANCE, Z., already prepared. I think about processed quickly.

"Neve," I say. "How long has the Accord been cracking?"

She goes very still for a fraction of a second. Then she picks up her fork. "Who told you it was cracking?"

"Nobody. Osvik spent forty minutes on 1987 boundary precedent and kept using the word historically in a way that meant not anymore."

Neve looks at me over her tray with an expression I haven't seen from her before. Something quieter than her usual frequency. "Three years," she says. "Officially it's fine. Unofficially, Dray and Farouk have been repositioning for eighteen months and everyone knows it and nobody's saying it out loud." She pauses. "You're going to be okay here, you know. You notice things."

I don't tell her that noticing things has never once stopped anything from happening to me.

Free period is forty minutes, and I spend the first thirty of them in the third-floor bathroom because it has a window that faces south and I get one bar of signal if I hold my phone at a specific diagonal.

Petra has sent three texts, a voice note, and a follow-up text that just says please just let me know you're alive, i know you're not dead but my anxiety doesn't.

I type back: alive. school is weird. tell you everything when I can call.

The voice note is two minutes and forty seconds. The file won't load on one bar. I sit in the stall with my phone in both hands and think about how Petra's voice sounds when she's scared — faster than normal, the way she drops conjunctions, the way she says my name on the second syllable instead of the first when she's trying not to cry.

I don't know which version is in the file.

I sit there for the remaining ten minutes just in case the bar becomes two bars.

It doesn't.

Soren is in the stairwell between third and fourth floor, sitting on the steps with his back against the wall, which seems like a fire hazard and also extremely on-brand. He looks up when I come around the landing and then does the thing I've clocked him doing twice now — the look. Like someone who has driven past an accident they caused and can't stop checking the mirror.

I stop on the step above him. "You keep doing that."

"Doing what."

"Looking at me like that."

He opens his mouth. Closes it. Runs a hand through his hair. "Like what."

"Like you owe me something."

The jaw thing. The muscle working. He looks at the wall across from him for a long moment, and when he looks back something in his expression has shifted into a register I don't have a name for yet.

"You sat in Osvik's class like you weren't afraid," he says.

"I wasn't afraid."

"That's what I mean."

I look at him. He looks back. Neither of us fills the space and the space gets very loud.

"That's not an explanation," I say finally.

"No." He picks up the book sitting next to him — thick, worn spine, some kind of territorial law text — and stands. He's a foot taller than me on a level surface. On these stairs it's worse. "It's an observation."

He goes up. I go down. I don't look back and I'm fairly sure he doesn't either but I can't fully confirm it.

My phone dies at six PM exactly.

Not battery. I checked — sixty-three percent. No missed calls, no failed connections, no spinning signal wheel. One moment I have three bars and a text half-drafted to Petra about the dining hall geography, and the next moment the screen is just a black rectangle in my hand.

I stand in the fourth-floor corridor and I press the power button four times.

Nothing.

The specific feeling of it settles into my chest like swallowed concrete — not panic, not yet, just the cold weight of understanding that the last line to anything outside this building has been cut, and that it wasn't an accident, and that whoever did it knew exactly what they were taking.

I pocket the phone.

I go back to room 412.

Neve has moved her chair to face the door. She's sitting with her knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around them, and she's been waiting — I can tell by the stillness. Neve is never still.

She looks up when I come in.

"I need to tell you something," she says. Her voice has shed the warmth entirely, and the silence where it used to be is jarring in exactly the way I knew it would be. "But you have to let me finish before you react."

The door swings shut behind me.

I don't move away from it.