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.
