"And if they can't? If he breaks containment?"
"Then we address that scenario if and when it occurs." Rae met Twilson's gaze evenly. "But removing these ferals now, when they are showing early signs of recovery, would be premature. And potentially catastrophic for their long-term prognosis."
The council chair, Dr. Werrow, raised her hand. "Explain."
"Feral recovery is fragile," Rae said. "It depends on consistency, on trust, on the slow rebuilding of neural pathways that have been damaged by years of isolation. If we transfer these individuals to a new facility, with new staff, new surroundings — we lose everything we've built. They regress. Possibly permanently."
She paused.
"Miss Orlav is the only person the alpha responds to. The bond between them — may be the only thing keeping him from complete psychological collapse. Remove her from the equation, and we lose him."
Silence.
I stared at my hands. Tried not to think about what Rae was saying. About what it meant.
The only thing keeping him from collapse.
No pressure.
The debate that followed was exhausting.
Council members spoke in turn, some agreeing with Twilson, others with Rae. The concerns were real — liability, safety, the precedent being set. What happened when other students decided to conduct unauthorized rescues? What happened when the human world noticed something was wrong?
"We have protocols for a reason," one man said. He was older, stern-faced, with the look of someone who had spent his life enforcing rules. "This student violated every single one of them. If we allow her actions to stand without consequence, we invite chaos."
"We also invite stagnation if we never adapt," Dr. Werrow countered. "The protocols were written years ago. Perhaps it's time to revisit them."
"Revisit them, yes. Abandon them entirely? No."
"No one is suggesting—"
"Aren't they? This girl waltzed off campus without permission, returned with five ferals in tow, and we're discussing whether she should be rewarded for it?"
"Not rewarded. But perhaps not punished either. The ferals are here now. The question is what we do with them."
Back and forth. Point and counterpoint. My head ached from trying to follow it all.
Then Professor Tomlinson spoke.
"If I may," he said.
The Council chair nodded.
Tomlinson didn't move to the screen. Didn't present data or images. Just stood there, hands clasped behind his back, and spoke.
"I've spent my career studying transformation narratives. Stories of change — of becoming something other than what you were." He paused. "Every culture has them. The selkie who sheds her skin. The werewolf who loses himself to the moon. The man who becomes a beast and forgets he was ever human."
His gaze swept the room.
"In most of these stories, transformation is portrayed as loss. A fall from grace. The human state is valorized; the animal state is seen as degradation, something to be cured or escaped."
He paused again. Let the silence build.
"But there's another reading. One that acknowledges transformation as... different becoming. Not loss, but change. And change, by its nature, contains the possibility of further change. Of return."
He looked directly at me.
"Miss Orlav made an observation in my class recently. She suggested that the restoration arc — the assumption that the original state must be recovered — may itself be flawed. That perhaps the transformed individual is not diminished, merelyaltered. And that healing does not require returning to what was, but rather integrating what is."
