The Board Meeting
1142 Words
The numbers were correct. The sourcing documentation was not.
Damon had been in enough meetings to know when a room was performing instead of working.
Marcus was performing. He had the easy confidence of someone who had given this presentation enough times that it no longer required thought. Slide after slide. Clean numbers, clean language, the kind of words that filled space without saying much. Optimized yield. Projected growth. Partnership sustainability.
Damon let him talk.
He had the physical file open in front of him and had not looked at it in ten minutes. He was thinking about a line he had flagged two weeks ago, during a morning when four other things were also demanding attention, and he had written a note to himself and moved on.
The note said: sourcing documentation, follow up.
He had not followed up.
Proprietary cultivation source. That was the phrase. It appeared in the same column of every sourcing report for the past eight years, and he had read it each time and accepted it the way you accept things that have always been there. It was the kind of language designed to stop questions. Specific enough to look like an answer. Vague enough to never actually be one.
“Reeves.” Marcus had paused. “Anything from your end?”
“Not yet,” Damon said.
Marcus went back to his slides.
The pharmaceutical subsidiary had been running for eight years. The arrangement was simple on paper: botanical compounds sourced through Ashveil Holdings, processed and formulated off-site, sold under a clinical wellness label that had grown steadily every year. It was profitable. Reliably profitable, which in pack business meant it had stopped being examined closely a long time ago.
Damon picked up his pen.
He knew, in the general way of someone who inherited a working system, that the cultivation happened in the margin territory. It was written that way in the older files, back when the language was still direct. Eastern cultivation fields. At some point that had changed to proprietary cultivation source and no one had asked why, including him.
He wrote on the paper in front of him: who cultivates.
He already knew. Had always known, at a distance he had chosen without fully realizing he was choosing it. The Pale wolves in the margins had been working those fields for decades. The pack put them there, in housing they had no say over, on land that happened to grow the exact compounds the corporate subsidiary needed. The partner lab processed everything. The revenue came back clean. The margin community got a subsistence stipend that covered basics and very little beyond that.
No compensation for the compounds.
No one had ever asked.
Damon looked at the pen in his hand. The doctrine kept them in the margins. The margins held the fields. The corporation sold what the fields produced. The whole thing fit together so neatly it had become invisible, just the way things were, the shape of a system old enough that no one living had built it from scratch and so no one felt responsible for it.
Marcus was talking about Q4.
Damon opened his laptop and went to the research project files. Two weeks ago he had approved a stack of routine assignments in one sitting. He found the compound analysis project near the bottom.
Lead researcher: Sera Maddox.
He read it again.
Then he put the laptop down and looked at the wall.
She was careful. He knew that from her file and from talking to her, which he had done exactly once in a context that was not logistical and had come away thinking she was the kind of person who followed a question until it had nowhere left to go. It was why the assignment had been approved. She was right for the work.
She was going to trace the compounds back to their source. That was her job. She would map the cultivation conditions, cross-reference the botanical profile, and start working backwards. She would find the margin fields. And then she would find that the people living there had been supplying the raw material for a corporate revenue stream for decades without anyone putting that plainly in any document.
She would get there before anyone in the main compound understood what she was looking at.
Damon could reassign her today. Two lines to the research coordinator, no explanation required. It would be done by morning and no one would question it.
His cursor sat in the message field.
He closed the laptop.
The meeting ended. People filed out with the particular relief of a room finally allowed to stop pretending to be productive. Damon took his time gathering his things, then walked out into the corridor.
Bryce was waiting. Not visibly waiting, just there, falling into step beside him with the ease of a man who considered every space his to occupy.
“Good meeting,” Bryce said. “Marcus has those numbers well in hand.”
“He does.”
They walked. Bryce had his hands behind his back, comfortable pace, like the corridor was a garden path and they had nowhere to be.
“I wanted to mention something,” Bryce said. “Lena Cross. The young one. She’s settling in well. The family situation seems to be sorting itself out.”
Damon listened.
“The full moon in two weeks.” Bryce glanced over with a warm smile. “Good opportunity to bring her into the shift gathering. Let her feel properly welcomed.”
“That’s reasonable,” Damon said.
“I thought so.” Bryce nodded, still smiling, and peeled off at the next turn with a small lift of his hand.
Damon kept walking.
He thought about that smile. He had seen Bryce smile at a lot of people over the years. He knew the difference between the ones that meant something good and the ones that were just a face being arranged into a shape.
Bryce did not track seventeen-year-old girls because he cared how they were settling. He tracked people who gave him reason to watch them. And the full moon gathering was not a welcome.
It was a closer look.
He already suspected her.
Damon pushed through the door at the end of the corridor. Cold air, grey afternoon sky, the sound of wind through the trees at the edge of the compound.
He stood there a moment.
Lena Cross. Sera Maddox in the research files, pulling on a thread that ran straight through thirty years of careful silence. Bryce smiling in a corridor about a girl he had already decided something about.
Everything was moving. The only question was whether he was going to stand still while it did.
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