The fever came on fast, the way storms do at the end of summer — clear sky, then everything at once. By noon I couldn't hold a teacup without my hand shaking. By three, Marla had her palm against my forehead and was swearing under her breath.

"A hundred and three," she said. "You're not leaving this bed."

I didn't argue. My skull felt packed with wet sand, and every time I closed my eyes the room tilted sideways. Marla sent word to the pack house herself — *Luna unwell, unable to attend evening rotation, healer's orders* — and for a few hours I let myself believe that would be enough. I lay under the blanket and watched the ceiling swim and thought, stupidly, that maybe this was the one thing the Protocol couldn't touch. A body actually breaking down wasn't a category on Ivy's sheet.

The hook hit at six-forty.

That's the only word I have for it. Not a thought, not a feeling — a hook, buried somewhere behind my collarbone, and then a pull so absolute my spine answered before my brain caught up. *Emelia. You're needed.* Eiden's voice, flat and administrative, dropped through the bond like it had every right to be there. My legs swung off the bed on their own.

"Emelia." Marla grabbed my arm, hard. "Emelia, look at me. You have a fever of a hundred and three. You are not walking anywhere."

"I know," I said. My voice came out strange, distant, like it belonged to someone standing behind me. "I know that."

I stood up anyway. My knees didn't buckle. My feet found the floor and then the door and then the corridor, and the whole time some small, clear part of me was screaming *stop, stop, this is wrong* while the rest of me got dressed and walked out into the rain like it was any other Tuesday.

---

I don't remember most of the walk. I remember the rain soaking through my coat by the second minute, cold enough to feel like something solid pressing down on my skin. I remember reaching the pack hall with my teeth chattering, my vision doubling at the edges, and taking my place at Eiden's left shoulder exactly where the Protocol schedule said I should stand.

He didn't look at me. Not once, in two hours. He ran through territory reports and warrior rotations and a dispute over grazing rights in the flat, even voice he used for everything now, and I stood beside him soaked and burning, answering when spoken to, nodding when required, my whole body a held breath. Somewhere around the ninety-minute mark the room started to swim in earnest. I locked my knees and stared at a point on the far wall and counted — *one, two, three* — until the numbers gave me somewhere to be that wasn't my own skin.

When the assembly finally broke, Eiden turned to the board Ivy kept propped near the dais and marked my score himself. I watched him do it. *Demerit — inefficiency in response time.*

"Two hours and eleven minutes between summons and arrival," he said, to the room, not to me. "Acceptable window is twenty."

No one asked why. No one mentioned the fever, or the rain still dripping off my hair onto the stone floor. Ivy, three feet away, was already reading her own evening's tally aloud — a training regimen report, formatted, cross-referenced, delivered a full day early. *Exemplary. Top marks.* Somebody near the back murmured something admiring. I swayed on my feet and nobody caught me, because nobody was looking.

I made it back to our quarters before I threw up, and then I kept throwing up long after there was anything left to bring up, my knees against the cold tile, my wolf slamming once, hard, against my ribs — a furious, wordless blow — before going quiet again.

---

By morning the fever had broken into something manageable, and I sat up in bed with the Protocol document spread across my knees, reading it the way I hadn't let myself read it before. Not for compliance. For architecture.

Three categories overlapped in language vague enough to be interpreted two ways — *responsiveness*, *initiative*, *resource stewardship* — and when I laid Ivy's last six scores beside the criteria sheet, I found a pattern: adjustments made after the fact, always upward, always for work already turned in. I wrote it all down. Then I found one clean example, dated, sourced, and I carried it to Eiden's study myself.

"I only want clarification," I said, setting the page on his desk. "This entry was revised two days after submission, in Ivy's favor, under a category that isn't defined anywhere in the document."

He read it for exactly as long as it took to dismiss it. "Perception bias," he said, and picked up his pen. "Noted. Demerit — challenging administrative process."

I didn't argue. I went back to my room and wrote it down — the discrepancy, his dismissal, the new demerit — in the notebook under my mattress.

Then I opened a second ledger, one Ivy would never see, and wrote it all down again.

It started with a chair.

Not my chair — I didn't own furniture, not really, not under the Protocol — but the seat at Eiden's right hand at the long table, the one I'd occupied every meal for a year. On the fourth morning after the fever, I came down to find Ivy already in it, a folder open beside her plate, her voice low and efficient as she walked Eiden through the week's grazing disputes.

"Luna Emelia's score dipped below the correspondence threshold," she said, not looking up. "I've been handling the border pack's letters in her stead. Standard procedure, per section four."

Eiden nodded like she'd told him the weather.

I took the seat across from them instead, and nobody said anything, and that was somehow worse than if they had.

It kept happening. Ivy at the border patrol briefing, standing where I used to stand, citing Protocol clause after Protocol clause like scripture. Ivy answering Luna correspondence "on my behalf," her handwriting looping through letters meant for my hand. Every time, she framed it the same way — helpful, procedural, temporary, always temporary — and every time, the pack absorbed it a little more, until wolves who used to nod to me in the hallway started nodding to her first, out of habit, out of whatever animal logic tells a body which way the wind has turned.

I watched the scoreboard do the same thing in numbers. Her line climbed. Mine dropped. I stood in front of it one evening with my notebook against my chest and did math I didn't want to be doing — which tasks she'd claimed, which ones I could still take back, which ones weren't worth the fight. I was still doing that math when the runner found me.

"Luna Emelia." He was young, out of breath, rain still beading on his jacket. "Border patrol found your father. East ridge. He's — Luna, you should come."

I don't remember the run to the healer's station. I remember arriving.

My father was on the table, grey as ash, his whole body seizing in short, violent pulses, foam at the corner of his mouth. Marla had both hands pressed to his chest, murmuring something low and fast, a healer's litany, sweat sliding down her temple.

"Wolfsbane," she said, without looking up. "Someone got it into him deep. I can slow it. I can't stop it. Not with what I'm authorized to use."

"What do you need?"

"The antidote. The real one. It's restricted — Alpha sign-off, always, for anyone who isn't pack." Her eyes found mine, and I understood the rest before she said it. "He's a rogue, Emelia."

I was in Eiden's study within the minute, my father's blood still on my hands from where I'd gripped the table edge.

"He's dying," I said. "Marla says the antidote can save him. I need your authorization."

Eiden listened. He actually listened, all the way through, his face arranged into something that might have passed for attention if I hadn't known him for a year. Then he set down his pen.

"Darwin Rogers holds no pack status," he said. "The Protocol doesn't extend resource allocation to non-members. I can't authorize an exception without precedent, and precedent isn't something I set on request."

"He's my father."

"I understand the relationship." Same voice. Same terrible, level voice. "It doesn't change the classification."

I didn't scream. I want to say I did, that some part of me finally broke loud instead of quiet, but I didn't. I turned and walked out, and somewhere behind me I heard the scratch of Ivy's pen updating the board before I'd even reached the door — *emotional escalation, unauthorized office visit, demerit* — my score falling while my father seized on a table two hallways away.

Three days. He fought for three days without the one thing that could have ended it cleanly, Marla rationing whatever she was allowed, my score dropping lower with every hour I spent at his bedside instead of at Eiden's.

On the third night, Eiden called the pack.

I stood at the base of the dais in the same spot I'd stood a year ago to be marked, and Eiden's voice carried over two hundred silent wolves without effort.

"Luna Emelia has failed to meet the minimum threshold for continued standing," he said. "Ivy Langford will serve as Proxy Luna, effective immediately, assuming all mate-adjacent duties."

Ivy stepped up beside him. Composed. Already home in the space.

Then Eiden looked at me for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, and his voice dropped into the register that lived under my mark like a hook waiting in dark water.

"Kneel."

My knees hit the stone before I understood the word had landed. I felt every fiber of myself scream against it and watched my own body obey anyway, bowed low before Ivy, before the pack, before him, the cold floor biting through my skirt.

And somewhere under my ribs, something old — older than the bond, older than his voice, older than the year I'd spent bending — cracked clean down the middle.

Something silver stirred beneath the fracture.

Then it went still.