Chapter 270 Isla's Burden
POV: Isla | The Shelter, medical wing
The shelter at five years of operation has the quality that things have when they have been running for a long time on resources that were always insufficient and which have been supplemented through the accumulated ingenuity of the people running them, the specific quality of something that has been maintained through commitment rather than through adequate provision, and which shows this in the specific texture of its operation, the systems that work and the systems that are being held together by the specific equivalent of good intentions and late nights.
Fifteen hybrid children, which is the number that has remained stable for the past two years because the children who came out of Fell's facilities have mostly stabilized in the shelter and because no new children have arrived from new facilities, the Hermetic Order's program having ended with Fell, the research distributed but not yet reconstituted into an operational program. The fifteen are between five and twelve years old now, which means they are not the same children they were when they arrived, which means their needs are not the same needs, the youngest ones requiring the sustained developmental support of children who are growing up inside trauma and the older ones requiring a different kind of support, the support of adolescents who are working out who they are in the context of everything that happened to them before they had the language to name it.
Lucia requires something different from all of them, which is what she has always required, which is the specific support of a person whose biology has not been charted before and which therefore has no protocol to follow except the protocol that observation and adaptation produces, and the simultaneous wolf and vampire manifestation she produced yesterday is the newest addition to the chart, documented in my records in the specific careful language of someone who does not want to alarm anyone and who is also being accurate about what she saw.
The medical clinic serves three hundred and twenty patients, which is a number that has grown every year since the first year and which has grown faster in the past six months as the pack split began to become apparent to people and as the community's anxiety about the split began to produce the specific health consequences that sustained anxiety produces.
The pack split has also reduced my volunteer base by twenty-two people, which is the number of the eighty who were contributing to the shelter in some way before the split and who have redirected their contribution to True Pack's operations in the East End, and the reduction is not catastrophic and it is also not nothing, and I have been covering the reduction by working longer and by asking the remaining volunteers to work longer and by managing the specific guilt of knowing that the longer I ask people to work the closer they get to the threshold where working longer stops being sustainable.
Ash is fifteen now and Ash has been helping in the shelter since Ash was ten, which is the specific progression of a child who processed their own survival by helping other people with theirs, and the progression has produced in Ash a fifteen-year-old who has more practical medical and crisis management experience than most adults who have not specifically trained for it, and who approaches the shelter's operations with the specific competence of someone who has been paying attention for five years.
Ash finds me at the end of a Tuesday that has had the quality of the past several Tuesdays, which is the quality of a day that contained more than a day should, and sits across from me at the medical desk with the expression that I have learned means Ash has been observing something and has decided that the observation requires a conversation.
"Let me take some of the burden," Ash says. It is not a request in the way that requests usually present themselves, which is with the specific tentativeness of someone who expects to be managed. It is a statement of what Ash intends to do, offered to me as information rather than permission. "I'm not a child anymore."
"You should be having a childhood," I say. "Not managing a crisis."
Ash looks at me with the fifteen-year-old version of the expression that has always been direct and which has only become more direct with age. "I never had a childhood. Not a real one. I had a facility." A pause that is not uncomfortable but which is the specific pause of someone who has said a true thing and who is giving the other person time to sit with it. "Let me help with theirs."
I look at Ash and I think about ten years old in a facility holding a wooden spoon and sitting with the boy in the corner who wouldn't stop pressing himself through the wall, and I think about fifteen years old in this shelter asking me to let them carry part of what I have been carrying alone.
I am about to answer when the shelter coordinator appears in the doorway with the specific quality of someone who is managing news that they would prefer not to be delivering.
"Estella," the coordinator says. "She's gone."
I am on my feet before the sentence is complete.
The note is on Estella's bed, which is where the coordinator found it twenty minutes ago when she went to check on Estella for the evening, and the note is in Estella's handwriting, which has the quality of her other writing, careful and precise in the way that people who had to fight for literacy because no one prioritized it for them write when they finally have the tool.
I don't want to be a problem anymore. If I leave, maybe the packs will reunite. Tell Isla I'm sorry. Tell Ash I'm sorry. Tell Lucia I'm her friend even if I can't stay.
I stand in the doorway of Estella's room holding the note and I think about thirteen years old and three years in a facility and the feral episode and the blocks rising and the first smile and everything that five years of the shelter has built in that child, and I think about what it means that she understood the political situation clearly enough to believe she was contributing to it.
She is thirteen years old and she understood the pack split and she internalized herself as part of its cause, and she walked out into a city that has two packs now, one of which does not want her to exist.
"Ash," I say.
Ash is already moving.