The Colony of Burning Ice

New Halloran has a polite silence at its center: half the colony turns wolf every forty days. They chain it, sedate it, and never say the word out loud. Wren Ashcombe, the colony's new medical officer, breaks that silence her third week when a patient shifts on her exam table. The patient is Ilar Rusk, the man who wrote the policy. He expects a report. She hands him a blood pressure cuff. Together they run the first real study of shift physiology in ten years, and it finds something the original terraforming company buried: the wolf is not an accident. It was designed. They were designed. Publishing the truth costs Wren her license and Ilar his position, and earns the colony the one thing it never had. A full moon and a porch.