Chapter 7: Classified

[SLOANE]

I sent the reply at six-fifteen, between setting the table and the after-dinner conversation, which was shorter than I'd braced for.

Mostly because Kai had located a pack registry in my bookshelf while I was in the kitchen and arrived at dinner with it already open to the relevant page, which meant his questions were more specific than I had prepared for and suggested he'd read considerably further than I'd intended to give him access to yet.

"The Blackthorn Alphas are triplets," he announced to the table.

"Yes."

Remy looked up. "Three of them."

"That's what triplets mean."

"Three dads," he said, like he was doing arithmetic.

"Yes."

Oliver was watching me. "Did you know them? Before?"

I answered what I could answer. I left the rest for later, for the version of later that had more shape to it.

The council's confirmation came three days after. Temple Residency—Neutral Jurisdiction Classification.

Full access to medical records across all registered packs. Unrestricted methodology—no requirement to operate under individual Alpha authority. Council jurisdiction for legal protection. Residence provided at temple grounds. No pack allegiance requirement.

They had already anticipated the reasons I would decline.

And built around them before I could say no.

'Interesting,' Eira commented.

'Yes.'

Something struck the moment I read the confirmation. The document was not a consultation request. It was not an offer of employment. It was a formal recognition that cross-disciplinary wolf-human medical methodology had been operating in the neutral territories at a level the council's existing infrastructure could not replicate, followed by a structural acknowledgment that this gap had become operationally significant.

They weren't asking me to work for them—more like documenting the fact that they needed me.

I sat with it for one more moment anyway.

Dr. Jackson had also taught me that fast was not always better. Fast was efficient. But important was different from efficient.

Preliminary liaison list to follow within the week.

It came on a Thursday afternoon. Fourteen packs, fourteen names. I read down the list. Cross-referenced two I recognized from the interpack medical network. Got to the bottom.

Blackthorn Pack. Representative: Beta Boderick Kane.

I read it twice.

Set the page flat on the desk.

"Sloane?" Isla had stopped filing.

I turned the list so she could read the last line.

She read it. Twice. Her pen didn't move.

"Oh." Her lips made that O shape. Then, quieter: "Oh."

'Well,' Eira said. 'There it is.'

"Schedule the packing," I told Isla. "Temple intake requires the boys' school records and medical clearances. Tell Evelyn we'll need two weeks minimum for the transition."

"Sloane—"

"They're one pack on a list of fourteen." I pulled the next file. "They are not why I'm going."

"I know they're not—"

"The child on page four is why I'm going." I opened the file. "The seven other packs with Stage 2 cases and healers who've run out of answers. That's why I'm going."

From upstairs came the immediate, detailed sound of Remy arguing that his rock collection was an essential item and not, under any interpretation, ballast. Kai's voice followed, calmly requesting a formal definition of essential before proceeding, while Oliver told both of them that they were both wrong and he'd already found boxes.

Isla stayed in the doorway for another three seconds.

"Right." She shook her head with a smirk. "I'll call Evelyn."

She went to make the call.

I kept reading.

The name Blackthorn sat at the bottom of the list.

I didn't look at it again.

Dr. Jackson visited around eleven fifteen on Friday.

Not in memory this time. In person—coat still on, bag over one shoulder—the specific energy of someone who had driven farther than convenient and wasn't going to mention it.

She looked at the opened envelope on my desk.

"Good." She sat.

"You knew about this."

"I knew it was coming." She set her bag on the floor. "They've been building toward it for eight months. When they commissioned that regional gap analysis, it was always going to end here."

"You could have mentioned

"You'd have prepared for it." She shrugged.

"Preparation would have changed your response. Your organic response was what they needed to receive."

I looked at her. "You played me."

"I structured conditions for an accurate outcome."

She picked up the residency terms page. Read it over with the same focused speed she read everything. Set it back down. "The terms are better than I expected. Someone inside that building understands what you need to function."

"Or understands what I'd refuse without."

"Same thing." She settled back. "What are your objections?"

"I don't have objections. I have conditions that aren't in this document yet."

"Specifically?"

I'd been running the calculation since page two.

"The boys come with me. They're not placed separately, and they're not separated from my operational schedule. I need a clinic space that I control, not one shared under the council's medical staff. And I want the residency classified under neutral medical practitioner, not council affiliate. The distinction matters for how Alpha authorities interact with me on site."

Dr. Jackson was quiet for a moment. "The boys I anticipated. The clinic space they'll negotiate. The classification—" She paused. "That one's going to require a specific language."

"I'll write the language."

"I know you will." She almost smiled. "That's why it'll work."

A courier arrived by late afternoon.

Evelyn had put him in the waiting room with tea and the particular expression she used when she was managing something I hadn't asked her to manage.

He came back to the clinic when I called and collected the sealed acceptance without opening it, confirmed the council's processing timeline—forty-eight hours—and moved toward the door.

Then he stopped.

Turned back.

Set an envelope on the desk.

Smaller than the first. No official seal. The kind of document that hadn't gone through standard printing because it hadn't been issued through standard channels.

"Secondary transmission," he said. "Flagged for medical practitioners with cross-pack clearance. Council's information division, not the formal correspondence office."

He left before I asked anything further.

I picked it up.

The header was unclassified—which meant it was simultaneously too recent to be classified and significant enough to be circulating anyway. A preliminary field report. Multiple pack sources. Consistent symptom clusters across non-affiliated territories with no shared travel pattern to explain cross-contamination.

Neurological disruption of pack bond communication. Scent recognition anomalies between bonded pairs. Metallic taste reported across multiple age demographics. Accelerated aggression without source stimulus.

I read the list twice.

None of the symptoms matched a standard infection profile. Standard infections had vectors, had rates, had predictable transmission patterns. This was moving without any of those things, or moving in ways that the reporting healers couldn't account for yet.

'That's not bacterial,' Eira said.

'No.'

'Or viral.'

'No.'

I set the report down.

Isla looked up from the patient board.

Dr. Jackson, who had been halfway to the door, turned back.

I heard her cross the room. Felt her read the report over my shoulder in that fast, thorough way of hers. The quality of her stillness changed—not visible, not dramatic, but present. The specific attention of someone who had shifted from movement into assessment.

"Scent recognition disruption between bonded pairs," I echoed.

"I read it."

"That's not infection behavior. Infections don't target bond architecture selectively."

"No," Jackson replied. "They don't."

I pressed my hand flat against the report.

Jackson said it quietly. Not alarm. Certainty.

"That's not normal illness behavior."