Chapter 117 What Terren Wants

Chapter 117 What Terren Wants
POV: Nora Ashveil

Malen with Doran meant she had gone to the tenth name on the list with the contact list download and was doing something with him that required her to be physically present, and the something was either completing the work of turning him against us or it was something else, and I needed Vera's read before I could determine which.
I messaged Vera: Malen is with Doran, what is his current position.
Then I put the phone face down and looked at Terren across the café table and made the decision to finish this conversation before I acted on Reed's information, because Terren was here now and the folder was on the table now and Malen being with Doran was a developing situation that Vera could manage for the next twenty minutes better than I could manage it from a café in the human district.
"You want protection," I said.
"I want my pack to have a path through this that is not the path Caldren took," he said, "my predecessor is dead, he cannot be charged, the complicity in the second protocol was his, I inherited the position and the records and the knowledge, I did not create the system."
"You did not disclose it when you found it," I said.
He met my eyes, "No."
"Three years," I said.
"Yes," he said, and the yes did not have any defence in it, just the fact.
I looked at the folder on the table, at the four additional names, at the two cases with his predecessor's signature, and I thought about what Terren's situation actually was, what the original pack law would say about an alpha who had found complicity in his predecessor's record and had maintained silence for three years.
The answer was not simple.
Inherited authority carried inherited accountability to a degree that the original texts were specific about, an alpha who assumed leadership of a pack assumed the responsibility for what was known, and knowledge held in silence was different from knowledge not yet discovered, and Terren had known for three years.
"I'm going to call Sira," I said.
I called her and explained what Terren had and what he was asking and she was quiet for a moment and then she said, "Bring him to the compound, I'll meet you there."
I looked at Terren, "The compound," I said.
He nodded.
We went to the compound, and Sira was in the Pack Advocate office when we arrived, and the meeting between Sira and Terren was one of the more specific negotiations I had observed, Sira with her fifty years of pack law knowledge and Terren with his three years of carried knowledge and a folder, and the two of them working through what the law could and could not offer without either of them pretending it was more or less than it was.
Pack law did not have plea arrangements, Sira told him, the formal hearing process did not include pre-hearing deals in the way human legal systems sometimes did, and the Council was not in a position to offer immunity for complicity that was documented and real.
What the law did have was a voluntary disclosure provision, a mechanism that had existed in the original texts for exactly the situation where someone with relevant knowledge came forward before that knowledge was discovered through investigation, the distinction between coming forward and being found was recognised in the texts as meaningful, and the Council was required to weigh the voluntary disclosure as a mitigating factor in any proceeding that arose from the disclosed information.
Not immunity but not nothing, Sira said, and Terren looked at the folder and said, "Define not nothing."
They went back and forth for forty minutes, Sira precise and Terren careful, and at some point I recognised that my presence in the room was no longer the most useful thing I could be doing, that Sira had this and the negotiation was in its working phase, and I stepped outside.
Reed was in the corridor.
He was looking at his phone, the disclosure files that Terren had sent through ahead of the meeting at my request, and his face had the quality it used when information was arriving that he was processing carefully rather than reacting to.
I leaned against the wall beside him and waited.
"Four more," he said, "and those are the ones they documented."
I looked at the corridor, at the compound around us, at the interim structure that was still learning to be what it was supposed to be, and I felt the weight of four more names settling into the pile of things I was carrying.
"The documentation is specific because the second protocol required specific records," Reed said, "the verification of success, the archival update, the witness notation, it was a system with internal accountability mechanisms because the people running it needed to trust each other and trust required records." He paused. "But the first protocol, the suppression protocol, had packs administering it independently, and the independent administration would not always have produced documentation, especially in the early years before the network was formalised."
"Cases that predated the formal system," I said.
"Or cases where the local administration was less careful," he said, "or cases where the outcome was the second protocol result but was never formally recorded as such because the formal recording system had not yet been established." He looked at the phone. "Four more is the documented number."
I knew what came next, the next question had a shape I could see from here, and I did not want to look at it, and I said so.
"I don't want to think about that," I said.
"I know," Reed said, "but we have to."
The corridor was quiet around us and the compound was doing its afternoon thing, and I stood with the question that neither of us had asked out loud yet, the question about what the undocumented number looked like, the forty-year span of the system operating across six packs with varying levels of documentation rigour, and I stood with it because Reed was right and standing with it was the only honest response to it.
My phone buzzed, Vera, and the message was not what I had been hoping for.
Malen is telling Doran she has evidence that the Pack Advocate position was created specifically to build a political case against pack leadership, she has shown him documents, I cannot see what they are, he is listening to her, I am losing him.