Dawn broke. Hannah’s eyes opened.

She was lying flat on her back on the cold concrete floor. Her mind felt raw and exhausted, as though it had been in the grips of some complex nightmare for hours. Hannah closed her eyes again and tried to remember what the nightmare had been like. She couldn’t. Everything hurt.

She tried to sit up, but slumped backward almost immediately. She looked down and noticed fresh bruises all up and down her arms. She couldn’t see her legs from where she was lying, but she was sure that they were the same.

Her mind raced. What had they done to her? Had they thrown her against a wall?

A series of clanging noises from outside the room sent painful vibrations into Hannah’s skull. Impossibly loud voices followed.

“He couldn’t get any slower, could he?”

“It’s like they don’t realize we don’t have all day –”

“Hurry the hell up!”

Booted footsteps clomped down the hall. The voices grew even louder.

“That one’s the kid, isn’t it? The one with the doc waiting outside?”

“God, yeah. He won’t shut up. Like we don’t have enough to deal with.”

“Better spring her. It’ll get rid of him, too, won’t it?”

There was a scraping at the door like fingernails on a chalkboard; Hannah winced and covered her face with her hands. Through the cracks in her fingers, she made out the forms of two men, who were wearing the same blue uniform as the woman from the night before.

“Get up,” ordered the one closest to her. “Let’s go.”

Hannah tried, once again, to lift herself from the ground, but she didn’t get far. She closed her fingers, so that all she could see was darkness.

“Every single time,” said the second man, sounding disgusted. “Got to be another Three.”

His deafening boots shook their way into the room, and then Hannah was hauled off the floor and slung over his shoulder. It was a quick movement, but every cell in her body screamed in protest. His companion reached for her hand, found the bracelet she’d been given the night before, and snatched it off.

The second man then dropped her into what she suspected was a wheelchair. Still covering her face, Hannah separated her fingers enough to watch as they moved her back through the jumble of hallways and into the lobby, where Dr. Trapp was waiting for her.

“And there she is!” he boomed, smiling broadly. “Someone’s not feeling very well this morning, is she?”

His voice was cheerful – giddy, even. If Hannah had been able to muster the energy, she would have hit him.

“We think she’s a Type Three, sir,” said the taller man, in a much more respectful tone than the one he had used with Hannah. “See, she’s got bruises on her legs.”

“Well, she’s not a Type One; that much is clear.” Dr. Trapp chuckled to himself, as if responding to a joke no one else had heard. “But I’ll be the judge of that. Type Twos can be deceptive, you know, and I don’t want to type her too early. All should be clear in another month. Who knows; you might get to keep her.”

He laughed again, and wheeled Hannah outside. The morning sun bit at her eyelids and the gaseous smell of the cars in the parking lot curdled her stomach. She was loaded into an ambulance and taken back to the hospital.

She must have fallen asleep for real somewhere along the way, because the next time she woke, she was in her hospital bed.

Her parents were beside her. Their eyes were round and wide.

“They poisoned me,” said Hannah in a small voice. “They locked me up and left me alone and then they poisoned me.”

She knew she was going to cry, but for once, she didn’t care. Her mother was there in an instant, blotting her tears with a tissue. Her father took one of her hands.

“They didn’t poison you,” he said. “But shh. Rest now. We’re very proud of you.”

That didn’t make any sense, and Hannah didn’t like it. She tried again to sit up, and this time she was successful. Her back only hurt about half as much as it had before. Sleeping must have helped.

“No,” she said. “They poisoned me.”

“Nobody poisoned you.”

“Then what did they do?”

Now that she was back at the hospital, it was as though the cold fear from the night before had been placed over an open flame, transforming it into a fierce, boiling rage, of a kind Hannah had never felt before.

Her parents gave each other another of the uneasy looks that Hannah had gotten used to by now.

“I still don’t know that she’s old enough,” her mother murmured. “Dr. Trapp said –”

“And I agree with him,” her father said wearily, “that we should wait on some things. But not this.”

Her mother’s eyes clouded again. “We can’t undo this, Max. She can’t un-know. Her innocence –”

It had been the wrong thing to say. Hot tears scalded Hannah’s face again.

“You have to tell me!” she shouted, and her head throbbed. “I got bit by the stupid wolf – I’m the one that Dr. Trapp tried to kill – and I’m not innocent! I stole Tom’s allowance once – and I told Gulliver that if he ate too many gummy worms he’d have a city of them living in his stomach, and they’d be able to make him do things, and he believed me –”

“A different kind of innocence, Han.” Her mother bit her lip, and then nodded. “I – okay. I might slip down to the coffee shop.”

“Catch up with you later,” said her father soberly.

Her mother left the room, her head bowed.

“It’s hard for her,” her father explained.

“It’s hard for me too.”

“I know. But it’s hard for her – and for me – in a different way. In a way that I hope you never find out for yourself.”

“I thought you were going to tell me.”

“Yes.” Her father stared into space, away from his daughter. “Do you remember when I told you that the wolf that bit you had poisonous teeth?”

“Yeah.”

“So I guess in a way, you’re right. You were poisoned. But not by Dr. Trapp. By the wolf. Its teeth – the poison – it’s a special kind of poison.” He exhaled sharply. “You… learned about the different phases of the moon in Mrs. Solberg’s class last year, right?”

“Yes, but that has nothing to do with this. You’re supposed to be telling me, you’re not supposed to be changing the subject –”

“I’m not changing the subject. It was a full moon the night the wolf bit you. It was also a full moon last night.”

“So?”

“So…” Her father closed his eyes briefly. “Maybe I’m doing this wrong. Look: when the wolf bit you, it gave you a disease – a sickness – through the poison in its teeth. A sickness that the wolf had, too.”

“It did look sick,” Hannah admitted.

“It’s called – it’s a long word – it’s called ‘lycanthropy’. Another word that people sometimes use for people who have lycanthropy is ‘werewolf’. But Mom and I don’t like that one.”

“Why not?”

“Because – I don’t know, Hannah, it reminds us of –” He grimaced. “What you need to know is that it’s going to happen again. Having lycanthropy is – you’re going to have to understand that – it’s not going to be easy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” said her father. “When a person gets bitten by a wolf with poisonous teeth… it means that once a month – whenever the moon is full – that person’s body is going to change into a wolf’s body for a few hours. It’s probably going to hurt, and the person won’t be able to stop it from happening. They might not even remember it, while it’s going on.”

He shook his head slightly, as though Hannah’s headache had been contagious. “And that means… that you’re going to have to be brave. You’re going to have to be really brave, once a month, from now on.” He hesitated. “Do you remember any of last night? Anything about what it felt like, or what you did after it happened?”

Hannah tracked her father’s anxious, flickering eyes, as though her own eyes had gotten stuck that way.

“I know it sounds… strange. Kids don’t usually hear about lycanthropy until they’re much older than you are. Remember how Tom and Andrew took Supernatural Smarts in school? They won’t have talked about lycanthropy yet, but their class will learn about it in another year or two.”

Hannah tried to swallow. Her throat didn’t seem to want to.

“But I don’t want to turn into a wolf.”

Her father put his arms around her shoulders and hugged her tightly. It was the kind of hug that had always made Hannah feel safe, like nothing in the world could touch her unless her father let it.

It didn’t, this time.

“Maybe someday you won’t have to. But until then, we’re all going to have to be brave –”

“I don’t want to be brave, either!”

She was crying again. This time she tried to stop herself. It wasn’t right to cry, not when her father looked the way that he did – but her body wouldn’t listen.

“Nobody wants to be brave, Han. Not when they don’t have a choice.”

Hannah’s eyes sought his, but they were focused on the floor.

***

She got to go home the next morning, after a short checkup. Dr. Trapp spent a long time looking at the bruises on her arms and legs. Then he took Hannah’s parents into a small room beside the nurses’ station and shut the door.

Hannah would have crept into the hall to see if she could make out what they were saying, but Aina was there too, hawkish and alert. There was no possibility of getting out of the room unseen.

Eventually her parents reemerged. Her father hauled her suitcase out of the room, her mother took her hand, and Hannah was free.

After a good night’s sleep, she felt much better. Just before breakfast, the colors that had been missing from her vision for almost a week suddenly reappeared. She could see red again, and green. It was only the memories moving uneasily around her head that proved anything had happened in the first place.

Hannah nodded, after a minute. Her father handed her a lollipop from the reception desk. It tasted too sweet. She pushed it to the corner of her mouth and kept her gaze on her shoes, from the hospital parking lot to their house’s front door.

Then there was a burst of sound, and people came running out of the house, their feet bare, their faces animated. Gulliver. Aunt Marissa, holding Moe. Andrew. Tom.

Hannah’s father helped her out of the car. She was immediately surrounded by a ring of sticky, grasping hugs. Her family seemed louder than they usually did. They smelled like orange juice and sweat.

“Look who it is!”

“We made a sign for you – see, it’s on the door!”

“Aunt Marissa made about ten million waffles.”

“I did. They’re in the kitchen.”

“Nana’s home,” said Moe with satisfaction, and stuck his thumb in his mouth.

Hannah looked up at the house. There was a big pink banner on the porch. “WELCOME HOME, HANNAH!” it read in bright blue paint. “WE’VE MISSED YOU!” Everyone had signed it. Even Moe had scribbled something, although Hannah thought his handwriting left something to be desired.

“Do you like it?” said Gulliver, beaming.

She nodded. She couldn’t help thinking that if she had come home even hours earlier, she’d have had no idea that the banner was pink. She had almost gotten used to the world looking brown.

They took her inside and helped her into a chair. She picked at her food, looking at the fibers in the tablecloth instead of at her family. She hadn’t been home since before the camping trip. She had forgotten the way it smelled of wood furniture and roast chicken; forgotten the cuckoo clock that ticked steadily over the dining room table; forgotten the creakiness of the floor. She had the vague feeling that somebody had taken her house away while she was in the hospital and replaced it with one that was just a little bit different.

“Eat up,” said Aunt Marissa, tipping a second waffle that Hannah didn’t want onto her plate. “Hospital food is terrible for you; everyone knows that. You want some whipped cream?”

Hannah gave a tiny nod. She couldn’t bring herself to be mad at Aunt Marissa, who lived all the way in Madison, a whole hour away. Still, she wasn’t going to say anything. Not in front of Tom and Andrew, and definitely not in front of her parents.