Chapter 118 The Full Extent

Chapter 118 The Full Extent
POV: Nora Ashveil

Losing Doran meant Malen was succeeding, and Malen succeeding meant the tenth name on the list was being turned into a weapon against the work, and I had two simultaneous problems that both required my presence and only one of me.
I messaged Vera: Can you get him alone, away from her, even ten minutes.
Her reply came in four minutes: Working on it, she is not letting him out of her sight, she has something on him, leverage, I don't know what yet.
Leverage meant Malen had done her research before she went north, had found something about Doran that gave her a grip, and the finding of something meant she had used the contact list download for more than addresses, she had used it to build profiles, and the profiles were the thing that had put her in the position she was in.
I put Vera on the back-monitor list, meaning I would check the thread every thirty minutes but would not actively intervene until Vera told me intervention was needed, because Vera was sixty years old and had been managing complicated situations with wolves who did not know what they were for fifteen years and she was the right person for this and I needed to trust that.
The Sira and Terren negotiation concluded at five, Terren accepted the voluntary disclosure provision terms, the folder went into the formal Pack Advocate record under the evidence of second protocol use, and Terren went back to his pack having submitted the disclosure and having the Council's acknowledgment that the submission would be considered in any future proceeding arising from his predecessor's documented involvement.
Not immunity.
But he had come, and he had brought the folder, and the folder had four names that were going into the case record alongside my mother's, and that was its own kind of significant regardless of what Terren's motivation had been.
Grace had been at the compound medical records since the morning, working with two pack medics who had been part of the interim Council's health reform process and who had the specific knowledge of pack physiology and historical medical practice that the work required, and I found her at seven in the evening still at the table with the records, and she had the expression she used when she had found something and was deciding how to deliver it.
I sat down.
She did not start immediately, which meant she was still choosing the order.
"I need you to understand something before I tell you the numbers," she said, "this is pattern analysis, it is not confirmation, pattern analysis produces candidates for further investigation not conclusions, and some percentage of what we found will turn out to be coincidence when we investigate the individual cases."
"Understood," I said.
"We went through forty years of unexpected death records in the Dunmore Pack and the six allied packs," she said, "we were looking for demographic clustering, deaths in the age range and circumstances consistent with either suppression protocol application or the second protocol's methodology, cross-referenced against the timeline of the protocol's development and distribution."
She put the list on the table.
I looked at the number and did not say anything for a moment.
Sixteen.
Four of them were in Terren's elimination file, confirmed, documented, the archival updates matching the protocol's specified format, my mother and three others I did not yet know.
Twelve more that fit the pattern, the same demographic range, the same circumstance signatures, the same post-death archival adjustments where they could be found, but without the direct protocol documentation to confirm the connection.
Possible cases.
The word possible was doing a lot of work, it was carrying twelve wolves who had died in circumstances that looked like the second protocol and might have been the second protocol and might have been something else entirely, and the only way to move them from possible to confirmed or possible to ruled out was the work, the case-by-case investigation that required time and access and the specific kind of careful attention that could not be rushed without becoming unreliable.
I looked at the list.
Forty years.
Four confirmed, twelve possible, and Reed's question from the corridor still in my head about the undocumented ones, the cases that predated the formal system or operated outside its documentation requirements, and the sixteen on this list were the ones that had left traces, and traces were not the full count.
Grace was watching my face, "I want you to understand what I'm about to tell you," she said, which was how she started sentences when she needed me to receive information in a specific way rather than the way I received information when I was not paying careful attention, "these are possible cases, some of them might be coincidence."
"Yes," I said.
"But sixteen, Nora," she said, "sixteen wolves over forty years, and four of them are listed in Terren's file, there is overlap between the pattern analysis and the confirmed documentation and the overlap is not what you get from coincidence." She looked at the list. "There are another twelve we don't have confirmation on."
I looked at the list and thought about twelve wolves who might have died the way my mother died and might have been recorded the way my mother was recorded and might have had fathers who found out and filed petitions and died two weeks later, and I thought about what it meant to be responsible for finding out which ones, and what it meant to not be the only person responsible for it.
"We find out which ones we can confirm," I said.
"That's going to take time," Grace said.
"Then we take the time," I said.
She nodded, and I could see her deciding whether to say the next thing or leave it, and she left it, which meant it was not immediately necessary, and I was grateful for the leaving of it because I needed a moment to sit with sixteen before the next thing arrived.
My phone buzzed, Vera, and the message was short, three sentences.
I got him alone, five minutes, I told him about your mother, I told him about Lena Ashveil and what the second protocol file says, he went very quiet.
Then: He is the reason she died.
Then: He was the compound medic who administered the protocol twenty-six years ago, Malen found this in his file and used it against him, that is the leverage, he has been living with what he did for twenty-six years and she knows it.