The man in the center looks younger than I thought he would. Maybe 40’s. Dark hair, neatly kept. Blazer over a sweater. Hands folded.
"Alex." His voice is both warm and stern. "I'm Acting Headmaster Tomlinson. I oversee the Frosthaven Review Panel, which provides governance for this facility. Thank you for being here."
Thank you. Like I had a choice.
I sit.
To Tomlinson's left: a woman I've never seen. Fifties. Sharp suit. Tablet, stylus, already taking notes. She doesn't introduce herself. Her eyes move over me like a scanner.
To Tomlinson's right: A large guy wearing black cargo pants, maybe this is Lumi’s other mate.
The fourth is another man wearing glasses holding a stack of actual paper. Medical files, maybe.
The fifth is Gavin. At the far end. Not centered. Present but not presiding. My evaluation open in front of him.
Behind me, along the wall: Cal. Stone. Lumi. Sven by the door.
"Let's begin," Tomlinson says.
The woman with the tablet goes first. She's reviewing Cal's cognitive assessments — the ones from the lab, the standardized surveys, the behavioral inventories he's been running since my second week. She reads the scores aloud without inflection. Pattern recognition. Verbal reasoning. Emotional regulation metrics.
"These are well above baseline," she says. Not impressed. Observational. "Highest quartile of cognitive scores in the facility's current population."
She swipes to the next screen. The regulation data — Cal's logs from every session. How I responded to escalation prompts. How I handled the scent reactivity exercises.
"Her regulation metrics are exceptional," Cal says from behind me. He wasn't asked. He said it anyway. The woman looks at him. He doesn't flinch.
The compact man takes over. He reads from the paper stack — incident reports. Sven's, mostly. The clinical language of a man who documents everything.
"On your third day, you made unauthorized contact with a feral resident through a perimeter fence, triggering an involuntary shift in a second resident and a cascade response across the facility."
"I walked to a fence during supervised outdoor time. A resident grabbed my wrist. The shift was involuntary."
"On your second week, you breached nighttime containment by physically compromising a reinforced door frame."
"I couldn't control the compulsion."
"On your third week, you left lockdown during an active containment alarm, used a dominance-register vocalization to override staff authority, and made physical contact with a feral resident in partial shift."
He reads each one like a charge. I hear them the way I heard charges read in the courtroom four years ago — each fact correct, each framing designed to make me the problem.
"Those are accurate," I say. "They're also incomplete."
He looks at me over his glasses.
"Every incident in that evaluation ended with someone safer than they were before I intervened. The containment response resulted in the fastest de-escalation of a feral breach in this compound's history. No restraints. No sedation." I hold his gaze. "If you're going to read my record, read the outcomes too."
Silence. Tomlinson's eyebrows go up slightly. Len writes something.
The murder case.
Gavin opens it. His voice is the flattest I've ever heard — stripped of everything personal.
Bite radius. Claw pattern. Blood analysis. The three samples. The partial match. The re-review findings — controlled wounds, not frenzied. Partial shift characteristics. The unknown blood sample that matches my current chemistry at sixty to seventy percent.
"The question before the Board," Gavin says, "is whether the James incident informs the placement decision."
"The question before the Board," the woman says, "is whether this resident is responsible for the death of a seventeen-year-old male."
