Chapter 12: A Lost List and Mother’s Secret Deal
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The cold-faced wolf boy had tossed me a piece of old parchment he found inside one of the frenzied wolves we’d caught.
“Didn’t make much sense to me. You take a look,” he said, before promptly going to bed.
That left me, half-dozing by the fire pit, staring at the thing.
The parchment was weathered, stained. On it, names were scrawled one after another—each followed by strange letters, numbers, and remarks.
Some kind of code. Or maybe… a record of fate.
The more I read, the more familiar it felt. Then my eyes stopped—sharp pain shooting through me.
D42-13: Daphne. Unawakened. Sent to Gray Tower for Processing.
My throat tightened.
No one had ever told me I was part of some "processing list.” I thought I ended up in the Gray Tower just like everyone else—by chance, or punishment, or bad luck.
I kept reading.
There were dozens more names—of slaves, laborers, people who had “vanished.”
Beside their entries?
An X. Or worse—“Cleared.”
I grabbed the list and stormed into wolf boy’s shed.
“Hey!”
I banged on the frame near his head. “Is this the storm you were talking about?!”
He cracked an eye open. “...Did you drink salty soup again?”
I slapped the list across his face. “Look! These people were erased! And I’m on that list!”
Now he was awake. He sat up, scanning the page, his tone serious.
“This… this is an internal purge log. From the Surveillance Bureau.”
“Where did you get this?”
“Inside a wolf’s stomach.”
He stared at me—and I saw his expression shift.
“This should’ve never survived.”
“Then why did it?”
“Because someone wanted it to.”
We spent the rest of the night combing through the entries. And near the bottom, scratched into the parchment by what must’ve been a fingernail, we found it:
A small symbol. A wolf’s claw—three prongs, curved downward.
My face went pale.
“That’s… my mother’s personal mark.”
She never used official seals. Never bore the tribe’s emblem. Only her hand-trained death units bore this hidden sign.
“She purged them,” I murmured.
Wolf boy said nothing, then quietly added, “She probably meant to purge you too.”
I nodded.
“She wanted a clean slate. To leave no trace.”
“But I came back.”
—
The next morning, I traded a chunk of salty bread for some intel from a snitch in the sheds.
He leaned in close, glancing around.
“She’s been moving, alright. Cut a deal with the Western Wolf Division.”
“What kind of deal?”
He swallowed. “She offered them half control over the Trial Camp…”
“In exchange for?”
He lowered his voice.
“...That every slave under her name be forever barred from rising.”
I laughed.
And that laugh—it came from somewhere real.
“She’s scared of me.”
That night, back at the Gray Tower, Firewood was teaching Amy how to make traps with wolf bones. Raccoon was practicing his “pounce technique” (and kept pouncing in the wrong direction).
I slipped the list under my mattress and whispered to myself:
“If she’s afraid—then I’m doing something right.”
“And I’ll make her fear me even more.”
—
Meanwhile, atop the high terrace of the main camp, a silver-haired woman lounged in her chair, listening to her subordinate report.
“Daphne has the list.”
She smiled faintly. As if she already knew.
“Perfect.”
“It’s time she thinks she’s winning.”
“That way, when she falls—”
She raised one graceful hand… and gently pressed it downward.
“—it’ll hurt a little longer.”
