So long without food, her legs were not her own. She stumbled and stumbled. “Alba!” she cried. Her voice echoed along the passageways. “Alba!” As she passed the closed doors, she pounded on them with her fist. No answer. Head swimming, she wove through the halls. No answer, no answer, no answer.

Had she imagined Alba all along?

She tried one hall, she tried another, the air growing thicker and dustier the farther she descended. How many doors were there? How many children had been kept here? With every step she took away from the boy, she grew more and more anxious.

“Alba!”

Turning a corner, she came to a hall even narrower and darker than the others. Rae, hesitating, crept down it. At the very end of its dark slope was a door that was not closed… but it was not open, either. The wood was splintered and cracked, a gap wide enough for a man gouged out of it. Something had forced its way in.

Rae, thinking of the creature she’d seen in her dream, approached tentatively. A trail of wet—slick, slobbering drops—led into and out of the chamber.

“Alba?” she whispered. She looked inside. Empty.

Yet this had to be Alba’s chamber. Floor to ceiling, the walls were covered with scratches, the same as had been marked on her bowl. But the ruptured door, the slobbering drops… What had happened? Rae, growing cold, feeling herself very alone, feeling the boy she’d left even more alone, backed away.

“Alba!” she called once more. -Ba, -ba, -ba echoed the dim hall.

Rushing, stumbling, she began retracing her steps. The wolf… the boy… she had to get back to him.

Up and up the halls she staggered. She gasped, trying to find air to make her limbs move—to make her vision stop swimming.

A high-pitched whining, almost a screaming, echoed through the dark. Heart dropping, legs quivering and useless, Rae tried to speed forward. The dreadful shrieking came again. Turning the corner, she saw two figures tussling—the nearly naked boy kicking, writhing, struggling wildly against a guard who, arms wrapped about the boy, was dragging him back toward the cell.

“Leave him!” Rae cried. “Let him go!”

Reaching the guard, she grabbed his arm, trying to pull him away from the boy. Seeing her, the boy struggled more. Howling, he tried to wrench himself away, but the guard, half-moons dark, tightened his hold.

“Where’s the wolf?” He spoke over the floundering boy. “Is this the heir? Your brother? The twin?” His voice sounded full of tumbling rocks.

“Let him g—” Rae began, but the guard did not wait for her response.

“I thought you both were… for so long… and now…” He looked at Rae hopelessly. Lines about his mouth lengthening, he nodded at the cell. “My duty,” he whispered as though the word explained all.

Rae grasped the boy’s flailing hand. At her touch, he quieted a little, and Rae turned to the guard. His half-moons had never seemed so deep or gray. “The door was open,” she said. “Please. You could leave it so. It’s not much to pretend you did not see us—it’s nothing, really, it’s simply doing nothing, leaving things as they were.”