Chapter 131: The One That Goes Wrong

POV: Nora Ashveil

Naming Eli as a co-respondent was the move Malen had been building toward since the registration complaint, and naming him in an inter-pack case was different from the previous complaints because inter-pack cases had different procedural standing, they could not be dismissed through the Pack Advocate office's own process, they required an independent reviewing body, and the reviewing body would need to evaluate Eli's role in the Pack Advocate work.

I told Reed I would call him back and ended the call and told Eli.

He was looking at the road when I told him and he kept looking at the road for a moment and then he said, "What does co-respondent mean in practice."

"It means you are formally named in the case and have to participate in the review process," I said, "you would need legal representation under pack proceedings, the formal registration we did does not insulate you from a case that names you independently."

"How long does the process take," he said.

"Minimum six weeks," I said.

He was quiet for a moment, looking at the road, and then he said, "She is trying to get me out of the office."

"Yes," I said.

"By making my presence in the office the subject of a formal proceeding that takes six weeks and requires my attention and creates a public record of inquiry into what I have been doing," he said, "which makes the work I have been supporting look like it needs defending."

"Yes," I said.

He looked at the road for another moment and then he said, "That is actually a well-constructed move," not admiringly, just accurately, the way he assessed difficult terrain before deciding how to move through it.

I put the Malen situation in the tomorrow column and brought it home, because the drive was the drive and arriving home was when I would be able to think about it clearly.

The situation in the third coalition pack arrived the following morning before I had addressed the Malen situation.

The third pack had been cooperating formally for six weeks, their internal review was underway, their alpha was one of the ones who had responded to the original texts with genuine engagement rather than defensive management, and I had believed the cooperation was real because the signs of genuine cooperation were specific and different from the signs of managed cooperation, and all the signs had been the genuine kind.

The enforcement action had happened three days before I was notified, and the three-day gap was the first indication that something had been managed before I was told.

An enforcer in the pack had been on patrol in a boundary area, the edge where pack territory met the human section of a mid-sized city, and a human bystander had witnessed something that required a response, and the enforcer had used compulsion on the human rather than following the new protocol, which was assess and document and contact the Pack Advocate office.

The human was hospitalised.

The enforcer was claiming the human had been a threat.

The pack was circling.

I drove there and arrived to find the pack's leadership in the specific configuration of a group of people managing a situation they hoped would resolve before outside scrutiny arrived, and the configuration shifted when I walked in because outside scrutiny had arrived and the shift told me everything I needed to know about how the past three days had been spent.

The alpha was cooperative in the specific way of someone who was cooperative because being cooperative was better than the alternative and not because the cooperation was comfortable, and he gave me everything I asked for, the enforcer's patrol log, the contact report, the incident record.

I read the records and found three inconsistencies and did not name them in the room because naming them in the room was not the most useful thing I could do with them, and I went to the hospital.

Dani was twenty-two and a nurse who had been at the end of a double shift when she had cut through a service corridor that she used regularly, a shortcut that happened to run along the edge of pack territory, and she had seen something she should not have seen and the enforcer had panicked and used compulsion rather than any of the available alternatives.

The compulsion had not been clean.

Full and correctly applied compulsion produced a specific result, memory suppression with no residual confusion, the person simply did not remember the relevant period, and incomplete or poorly applied compulsion produced something different, a gap in the memory that the person was aware of, a sense of time missing, sometimes intrusive fragments that did not make sense.

Dani was experiencing the second kind.

I sat in the hospital parking lot after speaking with the staff and looked at the building and thought about what the right thing was when the right thing had multiple versions that were all partially right.

The pack wanted the situation managed quietly, which was the old protocol, suppress the memory properly and move on, and the new protocol said assess on the basis of actual threat, and Dani was not a threat, she was a nurse who had cut through a corridor she used every week.

The suppression had not been complete, which meant she was going to spend time with a gap in her memory and intrusive fragments and no understanding of what had happened to her, and spending that time was its own harm regardless of whether anyone had intended it.

The right thing was complicated because several things were true simultaneously and the choosing between them was not clean.

My phone rang, Reed, and I answered and he said, "Malen has filed an emergency injunction with the inter-pack reviewing body, she is asking for the Pack Advocate position to be suspended immediately pending the co-respondent review, she is citing the third coalition pack incident as evidence that the Pack Advocate process creates situations where packs take actions to avoid scrutiny rather than correct themselves."

"She's using the incident," I said.

"She filed within twelve hours of it becoming known," he said.

I looked at the hospital building and thought about Dani inside it with a gap in her memory and no context for the gap, and I thought about what the Pack Advocate position was for and what it required when the right thing and the easy thing and the available thing were all different, and I sat in the parking lot and held the complication without resolving it because resolving it required more than the parking lot.

My phone buzzed, a number I did not recognise, and the message was six words.

I need to tell you everything.

It was from Dani.