"They would have been students here," I said slowly. "During the years right before the old council fell."
"Exactly." Neal spread his hands over the papers. "So I went looking in Rae's notes. She's been running the Healing Center for eight years. She's treated hundreds of patients with bond damage, trauma from the severings, all of it. If these ferals had been students here, if they'd shown any signs of instability before they went feral, she would have seen them. Treated them. There would be records."
"And there aren't."
"There aren't." Neal shook his head. "No references to feral wolves anywhere in her documentation. No patients matching their ages or descriptions. No cases that could have become what we're seeing now."
The room felt smaller. Colder. I wrapped my arms around myself.
"Maybe they weren't students here," I said. "Maybe they came from somewhere else."
"That's what I thought too. So I went looking earlier."
He pulled out a different stack of papers. These were older still.
"Old Frosthaven medical archives," Neal said. "Records from before the council fell. Before the Healing Center existed. Before Rae had any authority or access."
He spread the pages across the desk. I leaned in, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
Student files. Medical assessments. Clinical notes written in detached, institutional language.
And repeated, over and over, the same phrases:
Subject displays developmental instability.
Recommend preemptive intervention.
Transfer approved.
"Developmental instability," I read aloud. The words felt wrong in my mouth. "Preemptive intervention. What does that mean?"
"I don't know." Neal's jaw tightened. "But I know what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean treatment. It doesn't mean healing. And it doesn't mean transfer to anywhere I can find."
He pulled out another sheet. A list of names—some redacted, black bars covering identifying information, but enough visible to show a pattern.
"Thirteen students," he said. "Flagged with this classification over a two-year period. Thirteen young shifters identified as developmentally unstable and recommended for preemptive intervention."
"What happened to them?"
Neal met my eyes. "Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"No follow-up records. No recovery notes. No transfer confirmations. No referrals to anyone else." He spread his hands. "No deaths listed. These students just... disappear from the system. One day they're flagged for intervention, and the next day they don't exist."
We found Rae in her office on the top floor of the Healing Center. She turned when we entered, and I saw the moment she registered Neal's expression. The exhaustion.
"Dr. Wilson." Her voice was careful. "Lumi. What's wrong?"
Neal didn't waste time with preamble. He crossed to her desk and set the folder down.
"I need you to look at this," he said. "And I need you to tell me if you've ever seen any of it before."
Rae's eyebrow lifted slightly. But she moved to the desk, opened the folder, and started reading.
The silence stretched.
I watched her face as she turned pages. Watched the confusion give way to focus, then to something harder. Something sharper.
