Chapter eight
Gavin doesn't summon me. He comes to get me himself.
That's the first thing that's wrong. Every interaction I've had at this facility has been mediated — Sven walks me to Gavin, Sven walks me to Stone, Sven walks me to Lumi. Sven is the buffer. The handler. The man between me and everyone else.
This morning, Gavin is at my door. No Sven. No escort. Just the Director of Feral Academy standing in my doorway at seven AM with my file under his arm and a look on his face that I can't read because he's not letting me read it.
"Get up," he says. "My office. Now."
I'm already dressed. I've been awake for two hours. Leo left before dawn — quiet, bare feet on concrete, one look back at me from the doorway that I'm still feeling in my chest.
I follow Gavin across the compound. He walks fast. Doesn't speak. His shoulders are tight under the henley and his jaw isset and whatever happened between yesterday and this morning has moved something in him from clinical to urgent.
The admin building. The door without scratch marks. He opens it, steps aside, and I walk in and sit in the metal chair and wait.
He doesn't sit behind the desk. He sits on the edge of it. Closer to me than he's ever been. Looking down. The file is in his lap.
"The yard," he says. "Tell me what happened."
"Stone's report —"
"I've read Stone's report. I've read the containment log. I've watched the camera footage. I'm asking you."
Camera footage. Of course there are cameras. Of course they watched me walk to the fence and touch the chain link and trigger a chain reaction that shifted one resident and sent RJ into a state that took three staff to manage.
"I touched the fence," I say. "Leo grabbed my wrist. He shifted."
"You touched the fence."
"Yes."
"You were told to stay away from RJ's run. You were told by Sven. You were told by me."
"Stone told me to stay where I was. He went to break up a fight. I walked to the fence." I hold his gaze. "I didn't decide to. My body moved."
Something shifts in his face. Not anger. Interest. The wrong kind of interest — the kind that means I just confirmed something.
"Your body moved," he repeats.
"I know how that sounds."
"It sounds like a compulsion response. Which is consistent with what your blood work is showing." He opens the file. Not my evaluation file — this one is different. Older. The manila isyellowed at the edges and the red tag on the front is faded. This is the original. The one from four years ago.
My stomach drops.
"I've already answered your questions about the incident," I say. "Blackout. Don't remember. That hasn't changed."
"I'm not asking you to remember." He opens the file flat on the desk. Turns it so it faces me. "I'm asking you to look."
Photos.
Not crime scene photos — not the raw, unfiltered kind I was terrified of seeing in courtrooms. These are clinical. Diagrams. Close-ups of specific injuries, shot under flat lighting with measurement scales placed alongside the wounds. Medical documentation, not evidence photography. Detached. Precise.
But it's still a dead boy on a table, and my throat closes.
"The victim was Curtis James. Seventeen. Resident of the same group home." Gavin's voice is flat. Reciting. "Cause of death: exsanguination from multiple bite wounds to the throat, chest, and upper extremities. Time of death estimated between nine and eleven PM."
I know his name. I've always known his name. Curtis. He was older than me. Bigger. He had a laugh that carried through walls. Three weeks after I moved into that group home he was dead in the basement and I was covered in his blood.
