The differing timbre of the cry she’d heard, and the remark about “air support,” became clear the moment Amy stepped through the door. A bird of prey, sleek and streamlined, was perched on Dale’s welding-glove-clad arm, preening a wing.

“This is Perry,” said Dale, lifting her arm. “He’s a peregrine falcon. No one dives faster.”

Perry leapt off the glove and unfolded, with the by-now-familiar dark flash, into a tall young man in an undershirt and black shorts, brown hair flopping over his eyes. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, holding out his hand to Amy. “Thanks for the chance to cold-cock that bear; he’s a nasty one.”

“Cold-cock?” Amy repeated, shaking his hand. “You knocked him out? But—”

“Force.” Perry sliced two fingers through the air. “Mass is all by itself in the equation, velocity is squared. I may not weigh much, but I go damn fast.”

Amy remembered the bowling-ball-into-side-of-beef sound and grimaced. “Thanks,” she said. “He’s the only one of you I’ve seen who looked like he’d have been happy to eat me.”

“That,” said a woman’s cool voice behind her, “is because he is not one of us.”

“Come on, Stetsie,” Perry protested. “She didn’t mean it like that.”

“Call me that again and you’ll be short a few tailfeathers.” The tone made it a promise rather than a threat. Perry stepped back as if he’d been hit. “Your name is Amy?”

Throat tight with worry, Amy nodded.

“Turn around.”

Amy turned.

The woman standing there, arms folded across her chest, could have been anywhere from eighteen to thirty-five. Black cloth was wrapped tightly around her body from just below her shoulders to halfway down each thigh. Her skin was the color of coffee with cream, her dark hair was cropped short against her skull, and her eyes had an Asian slant to their lids.

They were also drilling into Amy’s forehead, as though they could see through skin and bone to read her thoughts by the sheer force of staring.

“You,” the young woman stated without heat, “are not a therianthrope.”

“How did you know?” Amy blurted.

“Your scent is wrong.” It was a declaration as factual as Your hair is red. “Why did they send you here?”

“Because I got too close to the truth.” Amy rubbed her tongue against the inside of her teeth, trying to find words that would explain what had happened without sounding like she was playing for pity. “I am—I was—an investigative reporter—”

“Has who you are changed with your coming here?” the other woman interrupted, her tone shading into chill amusement.

Amy shook her head, puzzled by the interjection. “Changed? Me? No.”

“Then you are still what you were. Continue.”

“Continue. Right.” Amy regathered her scattered thoughts. “So I’m an investigative reporter, and I was... investigating. I got into an office that’s sometimes used by Senator Matthews’ aides—you do know who he is?”

“No, we are completely unaware of the identity of a man who thinks we are crimes against nature and wishes we would kill one another to save him the trouble.” The sentence was delivered in the same deadpan tone as the woman’s earlier statements. “Cut off from the world we may be. Stupid we are not. Continue.”

“I will, if you’ll stop trying to intimidate me!” Amy snapped as her temper got the better of her. “I’m not your enemy, it’s not my fault I don’t know what’s going on here, but if you’ll let me finish this story without interrupting me every few seconds, I’ll be glad to listen to whatever you have to say!”

“The floor is yours,” the young woman said, the corners of her mouth twitching upward for a split second. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“Thank you.” Amy reined in her anger and found her place. “So I was in this office, and I bumped into one of the desks by accident. That moved someone’s mouse and shut off their screensaver. And right there on the screen was a memo headlined ‘Theri Rumors.’ I started reading, and then I started copying it down onto my palmputer to take it home with me—those offices always have jammers going, so I couldn’t send it straight from there, and besides, a story this big deserves to have a little time taken over it...”

The memo had reiterated that the official position of the Senate Committee on Therianthropy, and thus the Bureau of Therianthrope Control, was that therianthropes were animals, nothing more. Any rumors to the contrary—any stories about a group of theris within Sanctuary who spoke and thought and behaved like the humans they had once been, and who banded together for protection against the theris who did not—were just that, rumors. Once again, there were no such things as “human” theris, and certainly there were no “human” theris who had once gone by the following names...

“The names were the big break for me.” Amy had her eyes shut, remembering how frantically she had dictated into her link’s microphone, how eagerly she had watched the text appearing on the palmputer’s screen. “Because no one would bother to deny specific people were involved unless those people were involved with something.”

And once we had names, we could find families, and I have yet to see anything rivaling the organizing power of a mother who thinks there’s a chance she could see her child again.

“Unfortunately for everyone, they weren’t stupid enough to say, ‘Deny this person and that person and the other person have been doing anything.’ There were just instructions about what they should say had happened to those people if someone asked about them by name. A few of them were supposed to have been killed by theris, rather than being theris themselves, and the rest were a boilerplate ‘therianthrope of record, safely housed in the compound known as Sanctuary, no further comment.’”

Safely housed in Sanctuary—an oxymoron if there ever was, with what the whole world knows goes on in here.

“As soon as I had all the names down, I put everything back the way it was and got out of there. I went out to a café for a drink and a snack, worked on the article while I was eating, and got a decent first draft finished. I was getting ready to head home to polish and post it when my smoothie caught up with me. I headed for the nearest ladies’ room...” Amy shrugged. “And here I am.”

“Apparently you didn’t put everything back the way it was quite as well as you thought you did,” said the other young woman, her lips curving just enough to take the sting out of her words. “Welcome, if the word has any meaning here.” She held out her right hand. “I am Bastet.”

“Amy Pelham.” Amy clasped the hand with her own, feeling the harsh calluses on the other’s palm. “Bastet, the Egyptian cat goddess... you were the panther, weren’t you?”

“My alternate form is a panther, yes. But Bastet was more than just the goddess of cats.”

“Wait, I know this.” Amy held up her hand, thinking furiously back to the book of Egyptian myths she’d read in college. Bast, or Ubasti, or Baset, had gone through the same renaming and reportioning of godly power as the rest of the Egyptian pantheon over the centuries. She’d been portrayed, at one point or another, as a lioness, a lion-headed woman, and a domestic cat; her people had worshiped her as a goddess of the sun, the moon, war, dance, percussion instruments, and perfume. But even in times and places where she’d been only the patroness of good smells or noisemakers, she was still regarded as something else as well...

“She was a protector,” Amy said aloud. “A mother to her people. She watched over them all, but women and children especially.”

Bastet smiled, though her eyes were sad for a moment, as though she were remembering something which hurt her. “You know your mythology,” she said. “You’ll fit in well here.”

“Sorry?”

“A lot of theris who keep their minds tend to be geeks,” said Perry, who was lounging against the corner of the house. “We don’t know why. Possibly it’s because we were used to believing six impossible things before breakfast.”

“Or possibly it’s because you were simply too annoying to be subsumed into an animal’s personality,” Bastet countered.

Perry batted his eyelashes. “Aww, come on, you know you love me really.”

“I love you far more from a distance of a hundred feet straight up.”

“Sounds good. How’re you going to get up there?”

Amy was just stifling a laugh when a scream sounded from the trees behind her. Before she had gotten over her first moment of panic, Bastet was between her and the sound, Perry was feathered and in the air, and the Den was erupting people.

Some of them with two legs and some with four.

“Name yourself or we attack!” Bastet challenged, her hands held stiffly in front of her as though she were ready to fall forward into her animal shape at any moment.

“It’s me, Snowtips!” a girl’s voice answered, in between gasps for breath. “With friends!”

“Friends?” Bastet’s voice was wary. “What friends?” Her eyes darted sideways until she found Chipotle, and she waggled her fingers towards the trees. Chip nodded, shrank into chipmunk form, and disappeared in a blur of speed.

“New ones. Running from the bears’ pack.” Snowtips’ voice grew louder every moment, and Amy could see a vague blur among the trees now, but it was too big to be just one person. “All the big forms are busy fighting about who’ll be the boss now, and Terry and Liam thought they’d never have a better chance...”

Chip reappeared by the edge of the wood and nodded briskly. Bastet spun a finger in the air above her shoulder, and the little group relaxed. “Are they being chased?” the panther theri asked the still-invisible Snowtips. “Are any of you hurt?”

“Chased, I don’t think so,” Snowtips said after a moment of murmuring. The blur was now discernibly three people, the two on the outside supporting the one between. “And they weren’t hurt running away, but Liam has a fever and Terry broke a few fingers a while ago...”

Another murmur, this one more urgent. “They’d really appreciate it if not too many people crowded around,” Snowtips reported. “And as few predator types as possible, please.”

Bastet turned her head to look at her people. “Yatzi, see what you can do,” she said, beckoning the mare theri forward. “And has anyone seen Meddma?”

Dale held up her hand. A golden ball of fur rested in its palm. “Here she is.”

Bastet nodded. Her eyes, as if by chance, fell on Amy, and she waved her nearer. Amy came, ignoring the momentary weakness in her knees.

“Do you faint when you see blood?” the theri asked when Amy was close enough to hear.

Amy shook her head. “I’ve actually taken a few Red Cross first aid classes,” she said. “It came in handy when I used to babysit.”

“Excellent. Since you don’t have a fighting form—” Bastet smiled wryly. “—or any form at all, you’ll earn your keep as a medic. Assuming, that is, that you want to stay with us.”

Trying to think of a good way to say It seems to be that or bloody death and I’ve never cared for pain without being overly sarcastic, Amy found herself looking at the woods beyond Bastet’s shoulder, just as the three people who were approaching came around the last tree and into full view.

Her stomach nearly rebelled as the sight impressed itself on her mind.

I think I know what I’ll be dreaming about tonight.

Ayatzi and Meddma, a girl in her mid-teens with hair the color of her theri form’s fur, hurried forward. Both of them traded quick smiles with Snowtips, an Asian girl dressed in an off-white slip, her forehead creased with worry as she lowered the skeletally thin black boy she’d been supporting into Meddma’s arms. An equally skinny white teenager was leaning against Ayatzi, who was helping him sit down with his back against a tree. Both boys wore unraveling T-shirts and nothing else, and the dirt that coated them made Amy realize for the first time how clean all the “human” theris were.

They must have some other name for themselves, her mind babbled, trying to escape what she was seeing. I mean, they’ve all taken new names individually, they even named their house, I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have a name for their group...

But banal mental chatter had a hard time holding up against the stark reality in front of her. The white boy—Terry, she thought, from the way he was cradling one hand in the other—kept breaking off his conversation with Ayatzi and Snowtips to shoot frightened glances around the clearing. He seemed to expect an ambush at any moment. The black boy, who must be Liam, was only half-conscious, curling himself against Meddma as though hungry for her body’s warmth.

Amy had only ever seen pictures of people this thin, this haunted. They had stared out of the past in her history text, with names attached like Andersonville, Auschwitz, Bataan. She hadn’t wanted to believe things like that could still happen.

No one ever does. And that’s why they keep on happening.

She turned away and started for the Den. Whatever else the newcomers might need, they were obviously malnourished and probably dehydrated as well. If she could find some bread, or whatever the Den-dwellers usually ate... not too much, or they’d only get sick, but it didn’t look as if there was much to spare in any case...

Perry’s voice from around the corner of the Den stopped Amy with her hand on the doorknob. “...telling you, this is a mistake.”

“Then it is my mistake to make,” said Bastet, her tone cold as steel.

“What you do affects all of us, and you know that. Fighting for new arrivals is one thing, and taking in loners at least doesn’t get us attacked. But these two were already members of a pack!”

“They were being held against their will.”

“You know that and I know that. But when those bears come sniffing around our boundaries claiming we kidnapped two of their people—”

“Why should they do any such thing? You know their position on ‘the weak and useless among us.’” If Bastet’s sneer quotes had been any more vicious, they would have been visible. “They will let them go and laugh at us for being fools enough to take them in, when we can barely feed ourselves.”

Perry laughed a little. “Making my arguments for me now? Look, Stetsie, I know you want to help them—”

“I warned you already about calling me that.” Bastet bit off each word as though it were a piece of her enemy. “Do not presume on what used to be between us.”

“I’m sorry. It slipped out.” A frustrated sigh, and Amy could almost see Perry’s hand running through his hair. “Bastet. I know how you feel when you see what’s happening all around, but you can only do so much—”

“If you want to be our leader, Perry,” Bastet cut in, “propose another way than mine and see who will follow you. Until then, I lead this Pack and I decide what we do. And my decision is that we help and shelter these newcomers. Do you think otherwise? That we should give them back to the bears, maybe?”

“No, of course not. But you can’t keep protecting everyone forever.”

“Perhaps not.” A long pause. Then, so quietly that Amy could barely hear it, “But I will still try.”