I woke up knowing where I was.
This was no longer remarkable.
What was remarkable — what I lay still cataloguing in the specific warmth of Darius's rooms, the river going outside the window, the pack bond humming its five hundred lives at their morning register — was that my hands looked exactly like my hands.
Not glowing.
Not the full expression of two hundred years of accumulated survival.
Just — hands. With the small scar at the base of my right thumb from a cooking accident in Boise, and the slightly uneven nail on the left index finger I'd been meaning to fix for weeks, and the particular way they looked when the light hit them at a low angle and reminded me they were the same hands that had worked a food truck and made mac and cheese at midnight and pressed flat against a cellar
