SIX QUESTIONS THAT SOUND LIKE ONE
1166 Words
There are two kinds of interrogation. The kind where they tell you they’re questioning you, and the kind where they offer you coffee first.
He offered me coffee.
“Sit down.” He gestured to the chair across from his desk without looking up from the folder he was opening. “This won’t take long.”
His office had nothing in it that told you anything about him. Pack charter on the wall because every Beta office had one. A desk, two chairs, one window facing the inner compound. Everything in its place, nothing extra, the kind of clean that was a choice rather than a habit.
I sat. I took the coffee. Refusing it was a decision and I did not make unnecessary decisions in rooms like this.
He clicked his pen. “Current employment.”
“Pharmaceutical researcher. Same company, three years.”
“Pack contribution.”
“Resource committee, monthly margin supply runs, meeting notes for the community planning group.”
He wrote it all down. His handwriting was small and neat and I could not read it from where I was sitting, which I tried to do anyway without letting him see me try.
“Shift health.” Same pace as everything else, same flat tone. “Any changes since last quarter.”
“None.”
“Full shift last moon cycle.”
“Yes.”
Another note. I kept my hands loose in my lap and my breathing steady and told myself this was the same as every other check-in I had ever done. Six questions, standard form, ten minutes and out.
Except it wasn’t the same and I knew it wasn’t the same and the difference was him.
Every other officer who had ever sat across from me in one of these meetings had been background. A procedural step between me and the door. Damon Reeves was not background. He had this quality of complete stillness that made the room feel smaller than it was, not threatening exactly, just present in a way that made it hard to think about anything else.
I told myself it was a normal threat response. I was not entirely wrong.
“Physical concerns,” he said. “Joint pain, fatigue, anything in your recovery that’s been different.”
“Nothing significant.”
“Community integration. Any friction, unresolved issues.”
“None.”
He turned the page and wrote something at the bottom and I watched him do it and kept my face at the right temperature, the mild cooperative expression of someone with nothing to hide.
He finished writing.
He did not look up right away. He made a small mark at the edge of the page with the tip of his pen, the kind of mark that meant nothing, the kind you made when your hand needed something to do while your brain caught up.
“How have you been sleeping?”
I knew that form. I had memorized it years ago and checked every revision since. That question was not on it.
“Fine,” I said.
He wrote it down.
Then he looked up and the eye contact lasted one second too long. Not aggressive. Not warm. The specific look of someone who had asked a question they already knew the answer to and was checking whether you knew they knew.
“That’s everything,” he said. “Thank you.”
I stood, picked up my bag, said something polite. I walked out at the right pace and pulled the door shut behind me.
The hallway was empty.
I stood in it and breathed.
He had asked seven questions. The standard form had six. The seventh was about sleep, and it was not on the form, and he had asked it at the end after everything else like it was an afterthought, which it was not.
Bone pain disrupted sleep. The structural kind that came from a shift that failed. Mordveil treated it. The pack medical guide said so in two lines that most wolves had no reason to read.
He had left mordveil at my door. Then he had asked about my sleep.
I walked to my car and sat in it for a moment before starting the engine.
Work helped. It always helped. The lab gave the front of my brain something real to do and let the back of it work through problems without getting in its own way. I ran extraction analysis on my current project for three hours and let myself think in the careful sideways way that produced actual answers rather than just more fear.
At two my supervisor forwarded a new project brief with a note that it had come from the partnership division. I opened it.
Ashveil Holdings Pharmaceutical Subsidiary. Joint research initiative.
I read the company name twice and then a third time.
Ashveil Holdings was the pack’s business operation. The commercial arm that funded the medical programs and the margin housing and most of the compound’s infrastructure. Damon sat on its board. I knew that from the pack directory the same way I knew most things, quietly, without anyone knowing I was paying attention.
My company had existing contracts with pack-adjacent organizations. This was not unusual. The brief was completely legitimate on its face.
I closed it and opened it again and thought about the word coincidence and how long it had been since I had let myself use it.
I drove home at six and stopped at the communal post alcove to check my mailbox, which I did twice a week out of habit.
The envelope had the Elder Council seal in the top left corner.
I opened it there in the alcove with the evening coming down around me.
Wellness review notification. My name at the top. Standard format, standard language, except the date was four months early. My reviews ran every six months. Always had, for three years without variation.
This one was next month.
Signed by Elder Callum Bryce.
I stood there and read it twice and felt something go very quiet and very cold in my chest.
Bryce ran the wellness compliance division. He was the one who had signed the formal paperwork on every remanding I had watched in three years. He did not move reviews early without a reason.
I thought about everything that had happened in the last seven days and put it in order. The mordveil. The camera sector. Petra’s warning about supply chain questions. The check-in and the sleep question and the Ashveil Holdings brief. And now this.
Two possibilities. Damon had reported something to Bryce and this was the result. Or Bryce had noticed something independently and this had nothing to do with Damon at all.
The two answers needed completely different responses and I was standing in an alcove in the dark with one month to figure out which one was true.
- Writer
