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casually making Gets wholesale.
    Rennie growled softly. “That’s not our way.”
    â€œIt should be! Hex infects humans daily. We should match him, Get for Get.”
    â€œSo if he takes over half the world, we take the other half?”
    â€œHow can a hundred fight a thousand?”
    â€œBy using the intelligence we were born with. Hex keeps his Gets too close, refusing to let them think. They’re like infants without his thoughts guiding them.”
    â€œInfants with tommy guns.”
    â€œAll the more need to be clever, then.” Rennie watched the distant tumble of bloodstained white. A thought started to form, and then, with a realization that Degas would read his mind, Rennie veered away from that line of thinking.
    Degas glanced hard at him, suspicious of the guarded feelings. “What?”
    â€œWe’re wasting time here.”
    â€œThat’s not what you were thinking.”
    â€œWhat I was thinking isn’t up for discussion.” Rennie turned and stalked away, keeping his mind carefully void.
    Â 
    Outside the memory, Ukiah wondered at the timing. Had the war between the Pack and the Ontongard had anything to do with him? Rennie had no memories of Ukiah in Oregon. The Pack had no knowledge of Ukiah prior to this June. Still, Ukiah couldn’t ignore the odd coincidence of the date; Rennie arrived in Pendleton on September 23, 1933—the same year that the Kicking Deers lost a child they believed had become the Umatilla Wolf Boy.

CHAPTER TWO
    Kicking Deer Farm, Umatilla Indian Reservation, Oregon Tuesday, August 24, 2004
    Straight east on I-84, and Ukiah found his missing mountains. They rose like a wall running north to south before him. But where were the trees? The mountains in front of him looked as bare as the vast fields around him. He passed a sign reading ENTERING UMATILLA INDIAN RESERVATION alongside the highway, but there was no other indication he crossed a boundary. The fencing and fields on either side of the road continued unchanged.
    With the GPS system, the ranch was simple to find. All the local ranches seemed linked to the main roads via long, winding driveways. Sometimes the houses were tucked unseen behind a gentle swell, up to a half mile away, but black gravel made the driveways obvious.
    He followed the Kicking Deer driveway back to a sprawling ranch house with several well-kept outbuildings. He parked in plain view of the front door, and sat, listening to the engine ticking, suddenly nervous.
    If this was his family—then what?
    He’d given no thought to how he’d feel and what their reactions might be. Would they recognize him? 1933 was at once unimaginably long ago, and yet, via Rennie’s memories, as clear as an hour ago. He struggled to see the passage of time in normal human terms. It was difficult. His only points of reference were Rennie’s memories of his childhood, drifting banks of tattered clouds compared to thePack’s razor-sharp, sequential, and easily searchable memory. Ukiah suspected that even Rennie’s memory wasn’t a true representation of how humans thought, since Rennie had been made a Get young, and Ukiah viewed his childhood memories after they had been recalled and stored to alien sharpness.
    Ukiah couldn’t judge what his family might remember. He wished he’d been able to talk to Max freely about what to expect, but Kraynak’s presence had made that impossible.
    Nor was he sure what this family were hoping to find. The newspaper clipping spoke only of “boy” and “child.” How old was that? Five? Eight? Twelve? Eighteen? Were they expecting a child to return, or an old man?
    And now that he started to wonder, he wasn’t sure why they would want to find him. Mom Jo said once that if she lost Cally, she would look for her daughter until she died. Believing Ukiah’s parents would feel the same about their lost son, she hired Max in attempt to reunite