Aira was a forgotten spec in the rear-view.  Driving west on the 202, the early morning held a strange optimism.  The car's windows didn't need to be down to sense the sweet freshness of the air.  The light of dawn tinted everything with a soft-focus glow.  The drivers Tray passed were still dozing, squinting into the harsh sun of a new day.

As everyone headed off to work, there was magic in going the other way.

There always had been.

All the times he'd stumbled home in the post-dawn, having seen both sides of the night, stood out like flecks of gold in his memory.  A ray of sunlight picked one fleck out, and the reminiscence sparkled in his mind as it had done many times before.

It was the first time he had stayed out all night.  He had ridden home on the cross-town bus.  Hunkered down in his seat, businessmen in suits gave him the stink eye.  The window in front of him was cracked open a sliver sending a gust into his face like a personal supply of oxygen.  Headphones fed his mushy brain downbeat trance tracks like audible Novocain.  The burning sun sought out the red that rimmed his eyes and made them glow like embers.

Tray should have felt miserable.  He hadn't slept in twenty-four hours.  Over the course of the night, he had sent waves of sweat soaking through his clothes.  The taste of vomit on the back of his throat was only slightly masked by the flavor of barbecued potato chips.  He was a bum among the productive members of society.  He had never felt better.

He had discovered a secret that nobody else knew.  Like finding a fantastical realm in the back of a wardrobe or the other side of the mirror.  Like having the gauze wiped away from his eyes to see that mystical creatures had been living side by side with our known reality all along.  He had seen past the veil.  He had seen what reality actually was.  And everyone else still moved through their routines like clockwork dolls blind to the wonder all around.

Tray had often mentioned this moment, while in group.  The therapists and most of the other rehab patients didn't understand him.  They seemed to think he was feeling sorry for himself, sharing this instance of disgrace, as an example of how he first stepped onto his road to ruin.  He couldn't understand how there were so few kindred souls at the facility.  No one recognized that he was celebrating a special world – that alternate dimension who few visited.  A place he fought hard and long to return to, at the cost of everything else in his life.

The morning in front of Tray wasn't nearly so glorious.  Magic was only a memory now, and the sun dazzling on the tops of the mountains was only a reminder of how flat and plain everything was.

When Tray was certain no one was following him, he pulled into a half-built strip mall.  The empty storefronts shielded him from the street, and amid the gravel and dumpsters, there were no security cameras to record him.

"What happened tonight?" Palmer asked when the line on the burner phone connected.

"Nothing.  The girl slept all night."  It had been a long, boring ten hours by himself down there.  Being alone with that thing gave him the creeps.

Ever since that night in the wolf room, he had been having horrible nightmares.  It didn't matter where he was or what he was doing in his dream, first that roaring howl would seep in – far away at first like a distant train, then closer like approaching thunder, then it would wash across the landscape like a tsunami, spreading darkness, wiping away structures, annihilating everything in its path.  When all was quiet again, there was only Tray on the cracked, mucus gray earth with the monster right in front of him.

   He wasn't in control of his own body.  He desperately wanted to scream, to run, to get away from that terrible thing, but he just stood there.  It snarled.  The muzzle wrinkled and pulled back exposing the maw of deadly teeth.  It made a low growl – not much louder than a breath, but it caused the ground to tremble.  Still, Tray didn't flee.  Instead, he watched himself in horror as he reached out to the creature.  His hand sure and calm, while his mind panicked and pounded at the walls of its cell. 

His hand inched towards the wolf until it touched it on its foreleg.  Then he would wake with a gasp to find himself covered in a cold sweat, the sensation of touching it still on his fingers.  Each strand of the tough, wiry fur seemed imprinted on their tips, the skin of the animal leaving a residual heat on his flesh.

Tray would sit in bed running the pads of his fingers against each other, mystified by the feeling.  In the dreams, he always touched it in the exact same spot he had that night in its pen.  But he hadn't actually touched it.  He had worn two pairs of gloves  – the heavy, black rubber ones over the thinner blue latex ones.  How could he know what its fur felt like?

Even with the thing in its human state, Tray wanted nothing to do with it.  But Palmer had ordered him to start taking the nightshift because it was unsupervised, and it was easier to snoop around the bunker.

"So she's started sleeping normally?"  Palmer sounded like a bureaucrat filling out a government questionnaire.

"Yeah."  Tray just wanted to get this over with and go get something to eat.  "She seemed happy to be back in the room with the bed."

"Happy?  And you observed this emotion yourself?"

Seriously.  All Palmer wanted was facts – no speculation, no sympathizing, just information.  The automated voice on Tray's smartphone had more humanity in it.

"No, Commander Data, I meant she sleeps at night now that she's not on the cruddy mat in the cage.  According to the logs, she's still moping around."

"So is that all you have to report?  She is sleeping through the night and sulking in the day?"

"Liz— I mean, the Dietician reported that her appetite has returned to normal." 

For days after the transformation, the girl was shoveling food down like there was no tomorrow.  Now she had gone back to picking at her meals.

"What about Haddad?  Has he reported anything new?  Any further developments on his discovery?"

"Only that he reran the tests with the same results."  Tray had copied down two summary paragraphs that the geneticist had given to Blass.  He had no idea what most of it meant.  The only clear thing among all the jargon was that the DNA for the girl and the wolf were identical.

"Perfect.  Will you be watching the girl again tonight?"

"No.  Jamie has the shift.  R.J. gave it to him.  I couldn't get him to change his mind."  Tray hadn't actually fought for the spot.  When the scheduling changes were announced, he was grateful.  It meant he'd get to work the afternoon-evening shift and see Emily again.  He hadn't been able to talk to her since the night in the cage. 

That definitely hadn't gone as planned. 

Now, she was pissed with him.  He let her down when she needed him.  He couldn't believe how he had fallen apart in there.  But facing that thing had just been too horrifying.  What on Earth would it be like to actually confront that wolf when it wasn't tranquilized?  His body violently shuddered at the thought. 

It was a demon – it didn't belong in reality.  Like a cow born with two heads, it was a sign of the apocalypse, a harbinger of the end of all things.

Nothing could ever induce him to go into the enclosure again.  He didn't even want to be close to it when it looked like the little girl.  That was the sole benefit of the graveyard shift.  Gracie did her examinations during the day. So as long as he was there at night, he didn't have to assist her.

"I'm on the nightshift again Friday."

"Curious? Why does the geneticist want to work the overnight shift?"

"How the hell should I know?  Maybe he likes the solitude and mind-crushing boredom.  I know I do."  He was getting tired.  There was nothing to report.  He just wanted to hang up.  

Palmer was quiet.  Tray prayed he hadn't gone too far and would have to listen to more chastising and threats.

"Alright.  Listen carefully.  Time to earn the money we're paying you."  If he was mad there was no emotion in his voice to express it.

"What do you mean?  I earn it every day.  I risk my life and my freedom getting information for you."

"You haven't earned anything yet."  Palmer's voice took on a dark tone, like a shadow falling across a page of newsprint.  "The decision has come down to put an end to this before it goes any further.  You have only to perform this one last task.  We want some cold, hard data."

"How am I supposed to do that?  Not even the camera worked."

Earlier in the week, they had put a miniature spy camera at a drop-spot for him.  It used film, and without any electronics, it evaded the wand sweeps.  He had wandered through the facility that night taking pictures of everything, including several reports.  But when the photos were developed, they were all horribly overexposed. 

God only knew what kind of radiation those scanners gave off to do that.  He'd probably find out when a doctor found a tumor the size of a grapefruit in his gut.

"What do you want me to do?  Copy a three-hundred-page genetics report by hand?"

"Relax."  He sounded anything but relaxing.  His voice was a pure main-line of agitation into Tray's veins.

"Do this one last thing for us, and it will all be over," Palmer said.  "We'll pay out our agreement in full.  You'll get the rest of your money, along with a new identity, and a plane ticket to Mexico.  Your sister will get her treatment.  And you'll never have to deal with us or the DTAA or work the nightshift in the bunker again."

"What do I have to do?"  The gratitude that poured out of his mouth disgusted him.  It was that same tortured desperation that he had heard in his own ears whenever he dealt with a dealer he knew was going to screw him over.  The frantic need for hope overrode skepticism and common sense.

"The sensors don't pick up biologics.  So we want some physical samples.  I'm sending a list of what we need to your phone."

"They're all locked up.  I don't have access to the stuff they collected."

"But you do have access to the girl's cell?"

"So?"  He didn't like where this was going. 

As the night operator, he was able to enter the bedroom in case of an emergency.  But he couldn't actually do that.  Or could he?  It was just a little girl after all.  He could go in and tell her it was time for an exam, get the samples, and get out.  He could manage the courage for that.  Couldn't he?  He'd have to if he didn't want to let Whitney down again.

The phone chirped, and he opened the text message with the list.  "Blood, dermis, hair."  Yes, he could do this.  The list kept going: "Urine, stool, stomach fluid."  He'd encountered worse when he worked at the hospital.  "Bone marrow, spinal fluid, brain tissue."  What the fuck?

"How do you expect me to sneak into her cage in the middle of the night and get this stuff without killing her?"

Palmer took a breath.  Tray could hear it over the receiver.  It was weighed with horrible anticipation.  "That's precisely what we're counting on."