Chapter Twenty-Eight
DEAN
Oren Malloy's testimony was methodical and exact, which was what we'd needed.
He'd spent forty-five minutes in the witness box going through the stabilizer data, the biological mechanisms, the specific documented cases of pre-heat and rut regulation that showed what Avery's presence produced and what artificial management produced, and the difference between them.
He'd used language that the medical literature supported and the legal record would carry, and he'd answered the opposing counsel's questions with the patient precision of someone who'd been doing this for thirty years.
Dr. Vanderveld's cross-examination tried to establish that the stabilizer effect was a form of general somatic regulation that could be replicated through standard beta support programs. Oren had anticipated every line of questioning. His answers were thorough and specific and landed cleanly.
I was sitting in the first row of the gallery. Micah and Isaac on either side of me. We'd come in together and sat in a configuration that made no concession to professional optics, because we were past the point of concessions to professional optics.
The panel was three people: a legal analyst who specialized in designation law, an ethicist from the Institute for Pack Rights, and a retired appellate judge who'd written two of the opinions that had shaped how MIR cases got argued.
The retired judge was named Marguerite Osei-Kofi and she had the specific quality of someone who had heard a great deal of testimony in her career and was measuring this one against that accumulated standard.
I'd read three of her opinions while prepping.
She was fair, rigorous, and genuinely uncertain about the right outcome here — I'd been able to tell that from the questions she'd asked our legal team in pre-hearing conference.
Oren finished. The panel thanked him.
Next up was Tomas, testifying about the advocacy center's historical record and the policy context for the MIR framework.
He was direct and careful and made exactly the points we'd prepared him to make, plus one additional observation that I hadn't anticipated: a comparison to the early days of omega-rights recognition, when the legal standard had required "biological necessity" evidence for omega protections too, and how that standard had been contested at the time by many of the same arguments that were being made against MIR today.
Judge Osei-Kofi wrote something on her notepad.
Isaac, next to me, was still in the way he was still when he was absorbing something.
"That's good," he said, very quietly.
"Yeah," I said.
Marin had built this carefully. Testimony before Avery to establish the legal, medical, and policy context. Avery last, because she was the most powerful voice and you saved the most powerful voice for when the panel was ready to hear it.
She was sitting in the gallery behind us. I'd sat next to her this morning before the hearing started, in the corridor outside, and she'd looked at her hands and said: "Tell me it's okay to be scared."
"It's okay to be scared," I'd said. "You're still going to be good at this."
"That's a separate question."
"Yeah. The answer to both is yes."
She'd looked at me. Then: "Thank you. For all of it. All the way back to the break room."
I'd taken her hand briefly.
"Thank you for showing up," I'd said.
And she'd said: "I'm getting better at that."
Now I sat in the gallery and waited for her name to be called and thought about betas and the specific invisibility that the law had always tried to assign to them, and how it had never been accurate — how Avery had been essential from the moment she walked into a break room at a fundraiser and talked about artisanal salt and made a pre-heat omega feel like a person.
The law had missed that.
We were here to make sure it didn't miss it again.
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