"Alex. Is there anything you want to say to the Board?"
I've been in this moment before. Different rooms. Different tables. The same question asked by people who hold the power to decide what happens to the girl in the chair.
Every time before, I made myself small. Head down. Give them nothing. Survive whatever they decide.
Not today.
"I've been in systems my whole life," I say. "Foster care. Group homes. Juvenile detention. Every one of them had a version of this — a room, a table, people with files making decisions about me. And every one of them asked the same thing: is she manageable?"
The room is quiet.
"I'm not. I've never been. I broke a door frame with my hands. I growled and a man dropped. I walked into a containment breach and stopped it with one word." I hold Tomlinson's gaze. "I am not the kind of problem you solve by putting me in a smaller room."
He's listening. Not alarmed. Attentive.
"But every incident in that evaluation ended with someone safer. RJ is speaking for the first time in months because of the bond. Leo completed a full shift cycle and returned because I was there. The data says I'm not a risk. I'm the reason the system worked when the system's own protocols couldn't."
"And the James case?" the woman says.
"Run the evidence through the right framework. Let the science catch up to the question before you let the question determine my life."
Silence.
"I'm not asking you to trust me," I say. "I'm asking you to use the data. All of it. Not just the incidents. The outcomes."
I stop talking. My hands are shaking. My wrist is hot. The mark is pulsing under my sleeve and I don't try to hide it.
Tomlinson looks at Len. At the woman. At Gavin.
"I'd like to hear from the staff working with her. Lumi?"
Lumi stands. Walks to the front. She's small and steady and the room reorganizes around her the way rooms reorganize around people who carry real authority — not the kind that comes from a title but the kind that comes from having walked through the fire and brought people back.
Lumi talks as someone who has pulled feral wolves back from the edge and bonded with them and watched connection do what containment never could. She explains RJ's regression and the cost of isolation and his current progress after time with me.
She finishes. Sits down.
Tomlinson nods.
"The Board will deliberate. Alex, you'll be informed of the decision. Thank you."
I stand. The chair scrapes. The room watches me walk to the door.
The hallway. Fluorescents. The cold of the admin building.
Sven walks beside me. Quiet. We're halfway to the exit when he stops at a water cooler. Fills a paper cup. Holds it out.
I stare at it.
"Drink," he says.
I take the cup. The water is cold. I drink it standing in the hallway with the Board deliberating behind a closed door and everything sitting in a stack of paper that will determine what comes next.
"You did well," Sven says.
I look at him. The enforcer. The man who grabbed my arm the first day and hasn't stopped since. Who filed every report. Who watched me stop RJ with a touch and said she stopped him with something in his voice that wasn't fear.
"Thank you," I say.
