There was a boy at the hospital, and his name was Harry. He had scruffy light brown hair and a braided rat tail that hung just below his left ear. His eyes were bordered by dark circles. He was sitting on Rose’s sofa, the one that was allegedly pink, playing with a piece of string that had come loose from the stitching.

“You’re in my class, aren’t you?” he said, when he saw Hannah. “Stephanie’s class. At Trevarthen?”

“Maybe,” said Hannah, trying to sound haughty and cool.

“You are. You’re new. I don’t remember your name, but I’m Harry.”

Hannah frowned. “Like Harry Potter?”

“No,” said Harry. He explained that as a baby, he had been born early, and when his parents had finally been allowed to see him, he was lying in a hospital incubator, covered in very small, very fine brown hairs. His older sister had dubbed him Hairy, and the name had stuck.

“I’m not hairy anymore, of course,” he said. “Not usually.”

Hannah looked meaningfully at his rat tail. She wondered how bad his real name was if he wanted to be called Harry instead. It was probably something like Archibald.

“I’m Hannah.”

“That’s a good name. What Type are you?”

“Rose said Three,” said Hannah reluctantly.

“Oh,” said Harry. “That’s different from me – I’m a Type One. So… you don’t remember stuff after you transform?”

Hannah shook her head and immediately flinched at the pain it caused. “What does Type One mean?”

Harry looked at her incredulously and then smiled. Hannah knew that look – Andrew always had it when he was about to spew facts from one of the science books he’d memorized. She steeled herself.

“It just means that when I turn into a wolf, I still have the same brain,” said Harry. “I’m still me. The only difference is I have a wolf body. About a third of us are Ones; the rest are other Types. It all depends on how your body reacted to the poison in the wolf bite.”

Hannah sighed. “What else can you be?”

“Well, there’re other kids who come,” said Harry. “Tristan’s a Two. That means when he turns into a wolf, he thinks like real wolves do – you know, like in the wild. He says he can remember the night, but he can’t really control what he does. He says his wolf mind just keeps trying to escape.”

“I don’t remember anything at all,” said Hannah.

“I know. That’s because you’re a Three. It’s kind of like being a Two, but the wolf brain is stronger, and it wants different things. That’s the dangerous part.”

“The dangerous part?”

Harry wound the thread around his finger. “Type Threes… the wolf mind… they just want to… well, um, that’s how most of us got bitten in the first place. Threes are really hungry all the time. So people have to be careful not to get close to them when it’s a full moon.”

“I don’t want to bite people,” said Hannah indignantly. “Maybe I’m a Type Four.”

“There is no Type Four –”

But before Harry could finish, the door to Rose’s office opened, and four children walked in. They waved vaguely at Harry and stared at Hannah.

“These are our other regulars,” said Rose. “Tristan, Eva, James, and Nicolas. Everyone, this is Hannah.”

Four wan, weary faces glanced up at Hannah and then away. All of them were older than Hannah except for James, who couldn’t have been more than six.

“These guys all live in Curnow and come here every month, just like you will,” said Rose to Hannah as the newcomers sat down. “I’m sure you’ll learn the ropes in no time.”

Hannah scooted closer to Harry on the couch. Nicolas had sat down on her other side. He had stubble on his chin and was an entire foot taller than her. She tried to guess how old he was without letting him know she was looking at him. Thirteen? Fourteen? Definitely older than Tom and Andrew.

“I do not want to bite people,” she hissed in Harry’s ear.

She tapped her toes on the floor so that they made a fast-paced beat she could focus on instead of the pulsing in her head. She looked at her feet as she did it. For a little while longer, they were only boring human feet. Inside a pair of white and yellow sandals.

“Can you stop that?” muttered Nicolas from beside her. “It’s making my head hurt.”

“Well, it’s making my head stop hurting.”

“Nothing’s going to make your head stop hurting. You should know that by now.”

Hannah ignored him and started a new beat with her fingers on the back of the couch. Tap-tap-tap-TAP-tap-tap-tap. Harry watched her.

“Do you know Morse code?” he said.

“No,” said Hannah.

“You should learn. We could use it to talk to each other without anyone else understanding. We could even do it in school – we can hear a lot better than other people, you know. Nobody else would even notice.”

“It’s like a secret language?”

“Yeah. I have a book on it – my dad gave it to me for Hanukkah last year. People used it in World War II and stuff. You can talk to people just by tapping. I’m not very good at it, but I could get better.”

“Okay,” said Hannah.

Her head was really starting to ache. Nicolas was right.

After a few more minutes, Rose told them it was time to leave, that they had twenty minutes left before the moon rose, and that the adults and older teenagers had already been taken downstairs. She told Hannah that if she had any questions, she should feel free to ask them. That she and David were there for her. That she never wanted her to feel the way she had felt in Wisconsin.

Hannah squirmed away from the expression on her face. She walked behind Harry as they were led into the elevator. Rose punched a code into the wall and waited. They began to descend to a level that there was no button for.

Hannah didn’t pay attention to very much after that. The basement hallway they came out in was antiseptically clean and didn’t smell nearly as bad as the building she’d been taken to in Wisconsin, but it was still dark and silent and clearly not used very often.

They reached some rooms with doors that locked. One by one, Rose shut them in. She gave them each a hug first. When it was James’ turn, he clung to her and begged her not to let go. When it was Nicolas’ turn, he walked inside with his back hunched, slamming the door himself before Rose could close it.

Finally, only Hannah and Harry were left.

“Do you want to go ahead of Harry, or after?” said Rose, putting a hand on Hannah’s shoulder. “It’s up to you. As the newbie, you get to call the shots.”

“I don’t know.”

“How about at the same time? I’ll open the two doors together.”

She did. She gave Harry a hug and then Hannah, and Hannah was torn between tearing herself away as fast as she could or clinging like James. All she ended up doing was hugging Rose limply back.

Rose locked the door.

The pillow in the room was plumper than it had been in Wisconsin, and the blanket was thicker, and the paint on the wall wasn’t peeling, but other than that, it was the same. Hannah dragged herself into a corner and sat down.

What should she do? Crying wasn’t an option. Not anymore.

She wrapped her arms around her knees. She concentrated her mind on the tight, panicked feeling inside her chest, imagining it knotting into a small, hard ball, so tiny that even she would forget that it was there.

A tapping came at the wall. Hannah turned. It was coming from the room Harry had been locked in.

Hannah stared for a second, then scooted over a few feet. She rapped hard against the wall, three times.

Tap-tap-tap. Three raps back.

Although it felt like heresy, Hannah allowed herself a small smile in the dark. She tapped again. One, two, three.

Tap-tap-tap.

Then Hannah’s head swam and her knees shook and her hands wouldn’t reach the wall anymore. Dark, wiry hairs shot through the fraught skin that Hannah no longer recognized as her own. She clutched at her stomach and thought about begging the world or God or someone to make it stop, the way she had the last time, but she knew now that if she couldn’t stop it herself, then nobody could.

That was the way things worked.

***

Hannah’s life in Curnow developed a rhythm. She got used to wearing the Trevarthen uniform and sometimes even remembered to fold it when she got home from school. Her parents found a house that they liked, larger and brighter than the one they were renting, and moved into it just before Christmas. The backyard was big enough that when the first snow hit, Hannah spent all day building an igloo with her brothers, stopping every so often to pelt Tom with snowballs and drop ice down Andrew’s back.

Rather to Hannah’s surprise, she and Harry became good friends. Part of this was due to the fact that he had made good on his promise to teach her Morse code, and his lessons had also fascinated Ella. Together, the three of them practiced, using the bathroom door that connected Hannah’s bedroom to the twins’. Hannah found the process of memorizing all the dits and dahs much duller than she had hoped. She often tried to distract Harry by stealing something that belonged to him and running away with it, but Harry stuck to his guns and forced her to finish.

Di-di-di-dit, he tapped, before tapping a whole succession of things at lightning speed. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah grumbled, shifting sideways from where she lay sprawled on the floor. “I want a break.”

“You have to at least try.”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Nope,” said Harry. “It’s your name. H-A-N-N-A-H. You should at least know that one by now. Ella can do hers.”

“Ella’s name is shorter!”

“Just try,” said Harry, shoving the book towards Hannah. “It’s easier than you think.”

He waited. Hannah surprised herself by getting it right.

Before long, Morse code fever had spread to the rest of Hannah’s group at school. The problem was that, while the others learned at the same speed as Hannah or even faster, their ability to hear her messages was awful. By the time April arrived, half the class was fluent in Morse code, but nobody could ever hear what Hannah and Harry tapped out to each other during class.

“It’s because you guys do it so quietly,” Ella complained. “Couldn’t you be just a little bit louder?”

“Hannah tried one time,” said Harry. “Stephanie told her to stop making noise. If we do it louder, we’ll get in trouble.”

“You guys just need to listen harder,” said Hannah, smirking. “I can always hear Harry.”