The first processing queue opened at dawn.
I stood at the intake threshold and let the crowd move past me in single file, two feet away, close enough. I didn't touch anyone. I didn't need to. At full extension, my ability reached about eight feet in any direction — enough to skim the surface of a person's emotional field, catch the signature of their wolf if they had one, and register the particular texture of someone who had been tampered with.
Tampered with. That was the word Zane had used when I'd asked him how to identify a conditioned partial. They feel tampered with. Like a lock someone took apart and put back together wrong. The tumblers still move, but not the right way.
The first fifty people were clean. Tired, anxious, cold — the ordinary textures of people who had been moving
