The hall was already too warm by the time the doors closed.
Roman sat at a folding table at the front, Marcus on his left, two of his Gammas at the corners of the room, a clerk with a clipboard on his right. Twenty-three folding chairs in three crooked rows, eighteen of them filled. The fluorescent tubes overhead made the linoleum the color of weak tea.
He had felt the wolf shift the moment he stepped out of the car.
Nothing dramatic. A lift of the head, where there had been nothing before. An alertness behind his sternum that had not been there on the highway. He had crossed the sidewalk into the hall and the lift had become a *lean*, the wolf pressing forward inside him, scenting, intent. He could not see what it was scenting. Somewhere in this building was something that made the wolf uneasy.
He set the feeling aside. Whatever it was, it could wait until after the queue.
The first petitioner was pack. Heating subsidy. Approved.
The second was human. Medical bills. Deferred.
The third was human. Housing court. Denied.
Roman ran the queue the way the binder said to run it. He listened, he asked one question, he gave his answer. He had signed off on this script every quarter for eight years; reading it aloud was only a matter of pace. The wolf, under his ribs, did not settle. It did not pace either — it was not anxious, only *attentive*, the way a wolf becomes attentive in cover when something small and good is moving through the grass nearby. He could feel it cataloguing the room without him. Eighteen people. Coats, hands, voices, footsteps.
The fourth petitioner spoke. The fifth. The sixth.
By the seventh, the lean was so deep it was almost a tilt.
By the eighth, he could no longer ignore it.
He fiddled with his pen while he scanned the rows.
Sitting in the third row with a folder against her thighs was a woman in a green dress under a denim jacket.
She was leaning forward toward the lectern, attentive, her hair pulled back from her face, her profile caught in the bad fluorescent light. And she was looking at him. He looked at her for three full seconds before his wolf understood what it had been smelling.
When it did, every other thought in his head stopped at once.