Chapter 132 The Human Question

Chapter 132 The Human Question
POV: Nora Ashveil

Dani's message said I need to tell you everything, which meant the suppression had left more than a gap, it had left something she could describe, some fragment that had enough shape that she had found a number to message and had messaged it, and the finding of my number was its own question because I had not given it to her and I had not been to her room.
I messaged back: I'm in the parking lot, I can come to you now if you want.
She replied in forty seconds: Room 214, come alone.
I went in.
Room 214 was the standard kind of hospital room, and Dani was sitting up in the bed with the specific quality of someone who had been alert for hours in a situation that should have produced sleep, the alertness of a person whose mind was running over the same territory repeatedly and not resolving it.
She looked at me when I came in and said, "You were outside in the corridor, I saw you through the window in the door."
I had not known she could see through the window in the door, had been careful in the corridor, and the not-knowing was a reminder that the situation had produced an incomplete picture in multiple ways.
"Yes," I said.
"Are you with the people who did this," she said.
"No," I said, "I investigate things that go wrong in the community the person who did this belongs to."
She looked at me with the specific assessment of a nurse who had been dealing with people who were managing information under stress for however many years she had been working, and the assessment was sharp.
"There's something in my memory," she said, "not a memory exactly, more like the shape of a memory, I can feel where something was and isn't, and there are fragments, images that don't connect to anything around them, and I have been lying here for two days trying to understand what happened and I cannot."
"I know," I said.
"What do you know," she said, "specifically."
I said, "I know what happened to you, I know what was done and why and who did it, and I can explain it to you or I can not explain it to you, and I am asking which you want before I decide anything else."
She looked at me for a moment.
"You're asking me," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"The person who did this did not ask me anything," she said, "you're a different kind of person."
"I'm trying to be," I said.
She said, "Tell me in the morning, I need to sleep first and I need to not be making decisions at three in the morning about things this large."
I said that was right and I would come back.
I went to the parking lot and called Grace.
Grace arrived with the specific efficiency of someone who had been waiting for a call and had her bag ready, and she came to the parking lot and I told her everything and she listened with the focused medical attention she brought to complicated cases.
"The suppression is incomplete," she said, "I would need to assess her to understand the exact state of it, but from what you're describing, the fragments and the shape-sense, it is the kind of incompleteness that is not going to resolve naturally, it will stay exactly as it is, a permanent unclear gap with edges she can feel."
"Can it be reinforced," I said.
"Yes," she said, "a second application done correctly would complete the suppression and remove the fragments and the shape-sense, she would simply not remember the relevant period with no residual." She paused. "Or."
"Or what," I said.
"Or we could ask her what she wants to know," Grace said, "which is something the original protocol did not include as an option and which Sira's new policy technically opens because the new policy says assess on the basis of actual threat, and if she is not a threat, the assessment covers the question of what to do next, and what to do next could include asking her."
I looked at the hospital, "The pack wants the situation managed."
"Yes," Grace said, "and the management they want is the old management, complete the suppression, move on, document it as handled."
"Sira's policy does not require that," I said.
"No," Grace said, "it requires the threat assessment, which in this case finds no threat, and what comes after the no-threat assessment is the part the policy has not fully specified yet because this is the first case where it matters."
We sat in the parking lot for a while and I was trying to work through the version of this that was most honest and most protective of Dani simultaneously, and the trying was producing the thing that happened with complicated cases where the right answer was not one thing but a navigation between multiple things that were all partially right.
My phone showed a message from Eli, who had driven up separately and was in the parking lot in a different section, checking in.
I called him and told him to come to where Grace and I were, and he came, and I told him what Grace had said, all of it, and he listened without interrupting and when I finished he said nothing for a moment.
We were in a parking lot at two in the morning and the hospital was in front of us and inside it was a twenty-two-year-old nurse with a gap in her memory and fragments she could not connect.
Grace said, "She's going to spend her whole life knowing something happened that she can't remember, that is not protection, that is just a different kind of harm."
And then Eli said it too, in the same words, almost simultaneously, and the two of them saying the same thing was its own kind of answer but not a complete one because the answer still required a decision about what we actually did.
I said, "Pack law says—"
Eli said, "I know what pack law says."
The quiet that followed was specific.
"I'm asking what you think," he said.
I looked at the hospital and then at him and then at Grace and I held the question, what I actually thought, not what the law said or what the policy required or what the pack wanted or what the procedural correct action was, what I actually thought.
My phone rang, the pack's alpha, and when I answered his voice had the tight quality of someone managing something that had moved beyond what he was comfortable managing.
"She left a message with the nursing staff," he said, "for whoever came in with Pack Advocate credentials, the message says she wants to talk again tonight and she has been on the phone with someone for the past hour."
"Who," I said.
"Her brother," he said, "he's a lawyer."