ACT III | Chapter 23
The east wing roof held through another winter, which means I owe Petra twenty dollars and an apology for doubting her patch job. I don’t think she ever imagined herself as a construction worker but the last five years have taught all of us skills we never expected to gain. ?
I’m walking the facility on my Monday morning rounds — clipboard in hand because some habits predate the digital system and I like the feel of paper, even if Lina rolls her eyes when she sees it and calls me a hypocrite. The commune is awake. Seven forty-five and the corridors are already moving — the night shift handing off to the morning rotation, the kitchen putting out breakfast trays, the particular hum of a building full of people who slept here and will sleep here again tonight because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
Five years. The commune that greeted me with a cracked laptop and an intake system held together with index cards and Jessa’s beautiful handwriting now runs a digital patient database that six other regional facilities have adopted. We added the east wing annex three years ago — twelve additional beds, a dedicated rehabilitation suite with a full time physical therapist, a second surgical theater Asha fought for and won through a funding proposal so persuasive it should be studied as literature. The west corridor has a proper pharmacy now instead of a supply closet with ambitions. The archive in the basement has been catalogued, digitized, and expanded with contributions from three other Moon Twin collections that surfaced after word spread about Katina’s work.
The place is good. I built it to be good and it is.
I pass the intake desk where Jessa is processing a new arrival — a middle-aged wolf from one of the mountain packs, his left arm splinted and his face carrying the exhausted patience of a man who’s been told to wait one too many times. She catches my eye over his shoulder and lifts two fingers. Two more incoming today. I nod and keep walking.
The rehabilitation suite is full. It’s been full for three months straight, which is a direct result of Asha’s surgical program and also a problem I’m going to have to solve with beds I don’t have. Through the window, Petra is running morning check-in with her security team in the courtyard — four wolves in commune jackets, breath visible in the cold, Petra pacing the line with the steel cane she still carries even though she can get by without it almost all the time. She uses it to point at things now. It’s become an extension of her hand, part of her authority, and the security staff are mildly terrified of it. This is by design.
I make my notes on the clipboard. Roof: holding. Pharmacy stock: adequate but not comfortable. Bed capacity: ninety-three percent and climbing. Staffing: tight on the night rotation, need to discuss with Lina. Equipment: the older imaging unit in surgical theater one is producing inconsistent results and Asha has mentioned it twice this month, which means it’s actually critical because Asha mentions things once as information and twice as a warning.
The numbers are fine. They’re always fine — fine the way a bridge is fine when you know the maintenance is out of date and the weight is at capacity, but nothing has collapsed. Yet. But I spend Monday mornings walking the facility with a clipboard because the day I stop looking is the day I miss the first crack.
----
Lina is waiting in my office with two mugs of tea and the quarterly funding report, which tells me everything I need to know about the next hour of my life.
“How bad is it?” I pull out my chair and take the tea. Hot, black, splash of milk. Five years and the kitchen still makes it exactly right.
“Not emergency bad. Planning bad.” Lina sits across from me with her own copy of the report, a pen behind her ear, and the particular set to her jaw that means she’s already run the numbers twice and doesn’t like what they say. “Three packs reduced contributions this quarter. Coldwater pulled out entirely — they’re funding an internal healer expansion instead.”
“Coldwater was doing twelve percent of our pharmaceutical budget.”
“I know.”
“Their internal expansion is two healers and a supply closet. They can’t handle complex cases.”
“I know that too. They’ll send their complex cases to us anyway, without the funding to cover them, and we’ll treat them because that’s what we do.” She taps the report. “Regional council grant is flat for the third year running. Patient load is up nineteen percent year over year. We’re treating more wolves with the same money, and three of our biggest contributors are pulling back because —” She stops herself.
“Because the data makes them uncomfortable.”
“I was going to say because of shifting regional priorities.”
“That’s what they say. What they mean is the pack-of-origin analytics show patterns they’d rather not have on record.” I drink my tea. It’s good, and the morning light through my office window catches the steam rising from the mug, and I allow myself two seconds of appreciating the warmth before I look at the numbers. “All right. Walk me through it.”
We spend an hour on the math. It’s not catastrophic — it never is, because I’ve been building contingencies into the budget since my second year as Luna, because I learned the hard way what happens when the people controlling the resources decide you’re not worth the investment. We shift allocations. We defer the imaging unit replacement another quarter, which means I’ll need to tell Asha and she’ll need to adjust her surgical scheduling around it, and she’ll do it because she’s Asha and she makes impossible things work with insufficient tools and then tells me about it later with a precision that’s half complaint and half triumph. We identify two staffing gaps we can cover with cross-training instead of new hires. We find a line item in the facilities budget that can absorb part of the Coldwater gap.
By the end of the hour, the math works, because we are ingenious and stubbornly refuse to let the system fail because the people it serves can’t afford for it to fail.
Lina gathers her papers. At the door she pauses. “Sasha.”
“Mm.”
“It works this quarter. And probably next quarter. But we’re running out of places to compress.” She says it plainly, without drama, because Lina has never once in five years been dramatic about anything. “If we lose another major contributor, or if patient intake spikes again like last spring, the math stops working. And then we’re making choices about who gets treated and who gets waitlisted, and I know you, and I know that’s going to break your heart, and I’d rather we talk about it now than when it’s already happening.”
“I know.” My hands are cold around the mug. “We’ll figure it out.”
She leaves. I sit in my office with the funding report and the morning light and the knowledge that Lina is right, and that the commune I built is doing exactly what I designed it to do — catching every wolf the packs drop — and the packs are dropping more wolves every year and the math is going to stop working eventually and I don’t have a solution yet.
My thumb finds the crescent scar through my sleeve. Warm. Always warm.
I’ll figure it out. I always do.
----
Aleks finds me in the corridor at noon.
He’s been in the administrative wing all morning — meetings with the pack’s betas about territorial logistics, the kind of operational work that makes his eyes go flat with boredom even though he’s meticulous about it. He falls into step beside me without a word, the way he’s done for five years, and his hand settles on the small of my back with the absent steadiness of a gesture so habitual it’s become involuntary.
“The imaging unit,” I say.
“Another quarter?”
“Another quarter.”
His thumb presses once against my spine through my shirt. Acknowledgment, not sympathy. He knows the math as well as I do. He also knows I’ll find a way, because I always find a way, and that quiet confidence in me has never once wavered in five years and I’ve stopped waiting for it to.
“Lunch?” he says.
“Cafeteria. I want to check the dinner rotation while we’re there — the new kitchen coordinator is running behind on the meal prep schedule and I think the issue is a supply chain bottleneck, not a staffing problem.”
The corner of his mouth moves. The ghost of a smile I’ve learned to read as fluently as my own handwriting. “You can’t fix the kitchen supply chain over lunch.”
“Watch me.”
He exhales through his nose — the Aleks version of a laugh — and his hand stays on my back as we walk. The corridor is bright. The courtyard is visible through the windows — the east wing annex, Petra’s security team finishing their rounds. The commune is alive around us, humming with the specific energy of a place that’s doing hard work well, and I’m walking through the middle of it with my mate beside me and the crescent scar warm against my wrist and the Monday clipboard tucked under my arm and the budget numbers in my head and the knowledge — steady, certain, earned over five years of building — that this is my life and I chose every piece of it.
----
The courier arrives at four fifteen.
I’m alone in my office. Aleks is back in the administrative wing. Lina left early for a supply run. The afternoon is quiet — a gap between the morning’s operational work and the evening’s clinical review, the kind of hour I usually spend in the archive or reviewing intake data. Today I’m drafting a proposal for a new funding model, because if the packs won’t pay voluntarily then maybe a regional levy structure would hold, and I’m halfway through the framework when the knock comes.
“Delivery for the Luna.” The courier is a young wolf in a regional council vest — a runner, maybe nineteen, the kind of neutral-territory worker who carries documents between pack administrations and doesn’t read what’s inside them. He holds out a sealed folio. Thick paper. The regional council stamp pressed into the wax. Official.
“Thank you.”
He nods and leaves. I turn the folio over. The council stamp is formal — not the standard communication seal they use for routine correspondence. This is a governance filing. Legal weight. The kind of document that gets entered into the permanent record.
I break the seal and unfold the cover sheet.
The letterhead is the Regional Pack Governance Council. Below it, the filing type: Formal Petition — Pack Membership Dispute and Associated Medical Referral. Below that, the petitioner.
Alpha Ronan Kayce Julian, Julian Pack.
My hands go cold. Colder than they already are, which is a threshold I didn’t think my body could cross. The mug on my desk is still warm and the afternoon light is still falling through the window and the commune is still humming around me and Ronan’s name is on a governance filing addressed to my office.
I read the first line of the petition.
Regarding the status of Sasha Addison, Julian Pack —
The name stops me. My fingers press white against the edges of the folio, the paper creasing under my grip.
Sasha Addison.
Not Vasik. Addison. The name I was born with, the name I shared with my twin, the name I carried through every stage of my erasure — the fitting room, the whisper campaign, the modernization proposal, the bench in the east wing corridor where I sat with my hands between my knees and shook until I couldn’t feel anything. The name I left behind when I chose a new one, five years ago, standing in a cream dress in a room with one mirror.
He knows my name. The regional council has my name. Every pack registry in the northern territories has my name, and it’s Vasik, and Ronan filed this petition with the name he thinks I still answer to, the pack that I never formally left. His pack.
The afternoon light hasn’t changed and the tea is still warm and the commune is still running. But my hands are shaking on the paper and the crescent scar on my wrist is burning and I’m twenty-one years old again, sitting on a bench in an empty corridor, gripping the wood until the grain bites into my palm, while my twin laughs in a room down the hall and nobody turns toward the doorway.
Sasha Addison.
As if the last five years didn’t happen. As if I never left.