Penny was so excited she thought she might combust. Her chest buzzed with a feverish, sparkling energy, like her blood had turned to soda fizz. She could hardly sit still—her limbs wanted to move, to do, to run in circles until the joy turned to laughter. Every cell in her body screamed This is real. This is happening. In three days, she would be on a plane.
Three days until her boots hit the tarmac in Washington State. Three days until the clouds of the Pacific Northwest wrapped around her again like an old friend. Three days until she was surrounded by pine trees and snowmelt and wolvesong. "Oh my god," she whispered, collapsing backward onto her bed, arms flung wide. The ceiling above her swam as she blinked up at it, her mind spinning with too many thoughts to hold at once—packing lists, camera batteries, winter socks, passport, new notebooks, memory cards. She needed her field jacket, her lucky flannel, her waterproof boots. Did she still have the storm lens filters? A sharp trill buzzed from her phone.
She snatched it up, eyes flicking over the most recent email from Guy. Flight confirmed. Welcome packet attached. Housing info included below. "Guy," she muttered to herself with a small, silly smile. The call earlier had been brief but unforgettable. His accent was just slightly off-center—mostly North American, but smoothed by something else, something colder, more clipped. Canadian, maybe? Scandinavian? She hadn't asked. Too distracted by his voice, steady and even, the kind of voice that never raised or rushed.
He'd guided her through the onboarding process with calm efficiency—never fumbling, never missing a beat. Everything had already been arranged. Flights. Gear shipment. Even her assigned housing—a shared staff cabin near the Cascade River, on the edge of the North Cascades wilderness boundary. It sounded perfect. He'd called it remote, but with charm. She'd called it heaven. Penny rolled onto her side and stared at the glowing edges of the email.
A single line stood out: "We're eager to see your perspective on the wild." Her camera sat beside her on the bed—her mother's, older than some of the trees she'd hiked past as a kid. The lens cap was off, the strap frayed, the grip worn smooth by years of fingers. It had never failed her. Neither had the ghost of the woman who'd held it first. Her fingers found the silver pendant at her throat—the small wolf, now warm from her skin. She turned it slowly, the way she always did when her emotions surged too close to the surface. She missed her dad. That part came suddenly, stabbing through the joy like sunlight through a cloud. The ache of it never really went away. It just… settled in deeper during quiet moments.
Like now. Her eyes drifted toward the framed photo on her nightstand—the one taken during their trip to Iguazú Falls when she was seven. That had been one of their last big trips together before everything started to change. She could still hear the roar of the waterfall, feel the sticky humidity of the jungle, see the way mist turned the world silver at the edges. She remembered lying on her stomach in the leaf litter beside her dad, both of them camouflaged under green ponchos, camera lenses pointing up through the trees.
The oriole had been singing—flashes of yellow and black hopping through the canopy. Penny had whispered, "He thinks he's gonna get lucky tonight. Feels like a buffet's about to open."
Her dad had looked at her sideways and grinned like a madman. "You are my child." They'd camped that night by a tiny fire and eaten mushy lentil stew out of foil packs. Her knees were stained with jungle mud, and her fingers ached from gripping the camera too long. She hadn't minded. That was the night she took his picture—the one that now sat beside her pillow, always. Harry Voss, kneeling in the mist, wind tugging at his wild hair, camera raised as if the world had just given him a secret and he was about to capture it. She'd caught him mid-laugh, half-silhouetted against the falling light, water spraying behind him like stars. She hadn't known then what that moment would come to mean.
Now, she reached out and touched the edge of the frame. "I got the job, Dad," she whispered. "North Cascades. Just like you always said. Where the wolves run free." She smiled, but it trembled. "I hope I make you proud."
--- Meanwhile… In a cold, dim room hundreds of miles away, Dr. Brady Fallon leaned closer to his glowing screen.
Penny Voss's face stared back at him. The image on file was from her university days—a windswept candid snapped after a lecture, her braid tossed over one shoulder, her smile wide, fierce, confident. She wore a threadbare sweater and a pendant tucked just visible beneath the collar. A pendant shaped like a wolf. Fallon's eyes narrowed. "She looks like her mother," he murmured. "But her eyes… they're hers."
He tapped the corner of the screen, zooming in on the silver charm. It was clearer now—small, detailed, ancient. He reached for a nearby folder and flipped through the contents. Scans. Files. Photographs from two decades ago. One page showed a woman with violet-blue eyes and a silver wolf pendant identical to the one Penny wore. Another showed Harry Voss, camera in hand, standing in front of a glacier with a faint blur of something unnatural behind him.
Fallon turned back to the monitor. He scrolled through Penny's portfolio. There were hundreds of images—some of them published, some not. All of them brilliant. All of them... intimate. She had an uncanny ability to catch animals not just in motion, but in feeling. A lioness, blood on her whiskers, licking her cub with weary tenderness. A snow leopard blinking slowly through fog, eyes rimmed in sorrow. A red-tailed hawk mid-dive, wings extended like judgment. And one that made Fallon pause entirely: a lynx, crouched in moonlight, staring into the lens with haunted, knowing eyes.
There was something unspoken in it. Something... not quite animal. Fallon whispered, "It's almost like she knows what they're thinking." He leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled. "If she has even half of what her father had…" He didn't finish the thought. Instead, he clicked through another series of records—this time, ones marked with black stamps and restricted labels. Names. Coordinates. Field notes. Tissue samples. A wolf pack spotted in Cascade National Park. Gold eyes recorded by drone. Tracks larger than expected. Howls that didn't match any known species. The old bloodlines were waking up. And now they had a photographer headed straight into the wilderness. Fallon smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes.
"She'll be perfect," he said to no one.
Then, quieter: "For the shot. For the trial. For the truth." He reached forward and clicked one final image—a still frame from a wildlife documentary taken years ago. Harry Voss, standing with a wolf. Not behind a fence. Not at a preserve. But shoulder-to-shoulder, as if posing with a colleague. Fallon stared at the grainy picture for a long time. Then he closed the file.
--- Back in Penny's room… She finally turned off her phone and lay on her side, her hand curled around the pendant. The stars outside were bright tonight, visible even through the haze of clouds. The crickets sang, steady and loud, and the rustle of the trees sounded almost like words. Soon, the forest seemed to whisper. Soon. Penny's eyelids fluttered shut. And somewhere, in the threads between dream and memory, a wolf howled.
Not just any wolf. The one that waited for her in the wild. The one she didn't yet know she was bound to find. ---