Chapter 123 The Election

Chapter 123 The Election
POV: Nora Ashveil

Malen had contacted Petra.
I ended the call with the undecided pack alpha and called Petra immediately, and she picked up on the second ring with the wariness of someone who had received a confusing contact and was still processing it.
"Someone called me," she said, before I could say anything, "she said she was a Council member, she said the list I was on was going to be used against me, she said the Pack Advocate office was building a case to restrict Unbinder activity across the region." A pause. "She knew my name and my pack and my alpha's name."
"Her name is Malen," I said, "she is a former Council member who has been removed from her position and is currently operating outside any legitimate authority." I kept my voice level. "Everything she told you is false."
"I know," Petra said, and her voice had the specific quality it had in the garden when she said that sounds right, direct and grounded, "I know because I spent three days at the sanctuary with you and the others, and what she described does not match what I experienced, it does not match anything I have been told, and I have been told things that were designed to manage me before and I know what that feels like." She paused. "I called you to tell you she contacted me, not because I believed her."
I let out a breath, "Thank you," I said.
"Are the others she contacted going to be all right," she said.
"I'm working on it," I said.
Cass and Wren were the other two, and I reached them in the next twenty minutes, and both had received the contact with the same scepticism Petra had, which was not surprising given that both had been in the sanctuary for three days and had experienced the ten-person reaching and had arrived in Dunmore on their own initiative, which was not the behaviour of people who had been deceived into something, it was the behaviour of people who had made their own choices about where to be.
Malen was working the contact list but the contacts were not the vulnerability she had counted on them being, and the not-being-the-vulnerability was a function of what the sanctuary had done, the three days together had created something that the contact list download could not undo with a phone call.
I forwarded everything to Reed and told him to file the additional Council complaint against Malen through the formal channel, the contact of individuals on the Pack Advocate case list with false information constituted interference with a formal proceeding, and the interference was documented and specific and added to the growing record of what Malen had done since she left the compound.
The election happened the following week.
I did not think the election would produce any surprises, and I was wrong about that, not about Sira, Sira being elected was the inevitable result of fifty years of preparation meeting a pack that had just gone through a process that had made the value of that preparation visible, and she received the result in the flat precise way she received everything, and her acceptance statement was four words.
She said, "I'll do the work," and sat down.
The advisory council vote was where I was wrong.
Reed came in second.
The second position on the advisory council was not nothing, it was the position that held the greatest influence over the enforcement reform process that Sira had identified as the most critical structural change the interim period needed to produce, and the wolves who voted for Reed had done so knowing his history and knowing what the past months had looked like for him and making a calculation about what that history and those months meant for what he would do with the position.
He looked at the result with the expression he had used when the manager told him at the diner that Eli talked about him, the specific expression of someone receiving something they had not prepared for and finding the preparation's absence significant.
He accepted with the visible discomfort of a man who understood that the discomfort was appropriate, that he had not earned the position through the normal accumulation of good decisions over time but through a compressed and uncomfortable process of undoing bad ones, and that the people who voted for him had voted for the undoing as much as for the man, and the responsibility that came with that was specific and heavy.
I watched him accept and thought about thirty years of choosing not to ask the right questions, and I thought about the parking structure and the drive south and the burner phone at the tunnel entrance and the car parked outside Helen's house in the dark with food that required no response, and I thought about accounting lists and Tuesday visits and a father who had said I don't know when I stopped being him, and I thought about the specific way Reed had positioned himself between Caldren and me in the clearing with his body and nothing else.
The Pack Advocate position was formally confirmed at the same session, and I took it with less ceremony than I had been imagining for weeks, just the confirmation and the official entry in the record and then the work.
The first case was already waiting.
He was twenty-two, one of the enforcers I had trained two years ago, and he had filed the claim through the Pack Advocate intake process two days before the election, and his claim was specific: an order he had followed eighteen months ago had been given under compulsion, the compulsion had been direct and identifiable, and the outcome of following the order had caused harm that was now on his record as an enforcement action.
He sat across from me in the Pack Advocate office with the specific quality of someone who had been carrying a thing for eighteen months and had finally found the right room to carry it into, and I looked at him and thought about the young enforcer who had come to find me in the corridor and the counsellor's waiting list and the question about not being able to tell the difference.
"Tell me exactly what it felt like when the order was given," I said.
He began.
I listened.
My phone vibrated twice on the desk beside me, Reed's contact inside the northern territories network, and I did not reach for it because the enforcer was telling me something that required my full attention, and the full attention was what the position was for.
He talked for twenty minutes before I stopped him to ask the first clarifying question.
When I reached for the phone afterward the message was from Reed's contact and it was two lines, and the two lines said Malen had formally requested sanctuary from the last undecided pack, and the pack's alpha had accepted the request, and under original pack law a sanctuary request could not be refused and created a sixty-day protection period.
Sixty days.