POV: Luna
Mom insisted I attend the meeting, and the word she used was insisted, which in our family means the discussion is already over and the decision was made before the sentence began.
"You will stand at the front where the pack can see you." She holds my shoulders in the hallway.
"If I project accidentally in front of two hundred wolves, it will be worse." I name the risk.
"If you hide in your room, they will imagine you as a threat." She meets my eyes at my level.
"Visible and present is safer than absent and imagined." She smooths my hair without breaking.
"What if they look at me differently?" I let the fear surface because she is my mother.
"They will look at you differently." She does not lie, which is the thing I trust most about her.
"Your job is to stand in the looking and let them see that you are still Luna." She squeezes once.
"Still Luna." I repeat it like a compass heading and follow her into the main hall.
The pack looks at me with a quality of attention I have never experienced from people I grew up around. Marcus, who taught me to tie my boots at four, recalibrates the distance between us by three inches.
Jenna, who braided my hair at the summer bonfire, watches me with assessment layered underneath familiar warmth. Every wolf in the hall adds a new calculation to the way they have always seen me.
I hold it. Every recalibration, every scrutiny, every fractional adjustment — I hold it behind the wall and I do not project.
The effort is consistent for the first time in my life. Where suppression used to be a reflex I deployed when necessary, it is now a sustained operation at full capacity while the pack decides what I am.
Mom speaks and I do not listen to the words because I am listening to the room — two hundred emotional signatures shifting in real time as she explains what I can do.
Fear is the dominant frequency. Not panic — the measured, calculating fear of wolves who survived a war and learned that unclassified variables carry the highest cost. I feel it press against my wall in waves.
When Magnus asks about Dylan, the fear spikes by a factor I do not have the energy to quantify.
Mom answers him. I stand at the front and hold the wall, and when the meeting ends I walk out with measured steps and a face that betrays nothing because betraying anything would confirm the fear I spent ninety minutes absorbing.
The courtyard bench sits against the eastern wall beneath the oak that Phoenix tried to climb at seven and cracked a branch thick enough to require a chainsaw. I sit and press my palms flat against the wood and breathe.
The compound's emotional hum settles into its post-meeting pattern — clusters of wolves processing together, the gradual dispersion of anxiety into individual frequencies my shields can handle.
I sit alone for a while before Seren finds me — brown hair, freckles, daughter of a patrol wolf who transferred from Morrison's pack some time back.
She has sat beside me in three education sessions without asking about my abilities, which is why I remember her name.
She sits on the bench without invitation, leaving eight inches between us. She does not speak for a full minute — the silence of a person who decided to come but has not finalized her opening.
"Can you tell what I am feeling right now?" She breaks the silence with directness I did not expect.
"Yes." I answer honestly because she asked honestly and lying would be disrespectful.
"What is it, then?" She turns on the bench to face me, curiosity overriding the caution.
"Nervous, but not afraid." I read her signature with the precision of long practice at close range.
"There is a difference between nervous and afraid?" She tilts her head, genuinely interested.
"Nervous has forward motion in it." I search for the language. "Afraid has retreat."
"You are leaning toward me rather than away." I point at her posture as evidence.
"That means your body is curious even though your brain is not certain yet." I hold her gaze.
"Huh." She absorbs the reading and considers it for several seconds with visible processing.
"That is not that scary." She delivers the verdict with the matter-of-fact tone of a girl her age.
"It is not that scary," I repeat, and the words carry a weight she does not realize she just lifted.
"I thought it would be like mind reading." She pulls one knee up onto the bench between us.
"Feelings are not thoughts." I draw the distinction I have been drawing my entire conscious life.
"I can tell you are nervous and curious but I cannot tell you what you had for lunch." I clarify.
"Leftover pasta." She grins, and the grin shifts her signature from nervous-curious to warm.
"That is beyond my abilities." I allow myself a smile because her warmth makes the wall easier.
"Good — a girl needs some privacy." She leans back against the bench with performed casualness.
It is not a solution. One young girl choosing not to be afraid does not recalibrate two hundred wolves who watched my mother explain that I can push emotions into their bodies.
But it matters more than I expected — one person choosing proximity over distance, curiosity over fear, eight inches she could have filled with retreat and chose to fill with a question.
I find Orion in his room after dinner. His notebook is open to the page with my name at the top, and the page has grown — three additional sections in his precise handwriting.
"I need to know what you have concluded." I stand in his doorway with my arms crossed.
"I have not concluded." He does not look up from the notebook spread on his desk.
"You have three pages of data under my name." I step inside and sit in the chair beside him.
"Data is not conclusion." He sets his pen down and meets my eyes with clinical neutrality.
"Orion." I let his name carry the weight of a sister who needs honesty more than precision.
"I am not ready to state it." He holds my gaze without deflecting or apologizing for the delay.
"Why not?" I press once because the full moon is in three days and I need to understand.
"Because stating it requires one more data point." He taps the blank line at the bottom of the page.
"Which data point?" I lean forward to read the notation beside the empty space he left.
"The full moon." He closes the notebook with the careful pressure of a boy protecting his findings.
"I need to see what happens to both of you simultaneously." He holds my eyes across the desk.