Chapter 66: On the Record

The pack house had the television on and nobody was really watching it at the moment.

Late light came through the tall windows and laid itself across the cedar floor. The stove ticked. Somebody had left a mug on the arm of the couch and forgotten it. Outside, the tree line moved in a wind that did not reach the room. Inside, the news did.

A snow leopard anchor. A paused frame of Zariel walking into fire with a speaker at his feet. A still of cages. A still of Lir’s face, rifle slung, saying Nox was the enemy. Then the other footage, the prison lot, Nox untouched while men fell around him.

Human panels called it proof. Anthro panels called it a setup. Comment sections did both at once. A German shepherd in another state was still in a hospital. Somebody had thrown a brick through a clinic window two towns over. Creep’s upload had done what Stark wanted. It had also done what they had been afraid it would do.

Roan stood behind the couch with his arms folded, golden eyes on the screen, ears neither up nor down.

“That’s the last clean move we had,” he said. “After this, we talk, and then we live with whatever the world decides to hear.”

The cards fall where they may.

Kiran was upside down in an armchair, tail over his own face. “We could leak the blooper reel. People like us when we are stupid.”

“We are not leaking the blooper reel as foreign policy,” Cass said.

Stark sat at the table with a laptop and did not look up. “The camp tape is already doing the work. This next one is the part they cannot edit around us.”

They cleared the living room. Khepri set two cameras. One wide. One close. Remi stayed at the edge of the frame until Roan pointed at the couch and told him to sit. Lir took the far end like a man attending a meeting he had not agreed to. Zariel stood. Kiran eventually sat upright. Stark and Khepri remained off to the side, one running the board, one in the shot only when Roan said his name.

Roan waited until the red lights were steady.

“My name is Roan,” he said. “This is my pack. Not all of us. The ones who agreed to be seen.”

He went down the line without dressing it up. Cass, the midnight wolf beside him. Zariel. Kiran. Khepri. Stark. Then he nodded at the two who had not knelt.

“Remi. Lir. They are not pack. They fight with the resistance. They are here because they are invaluable assets to the resistance that fights against Nox’ Thar, your real enemy.”

Cass took it from there. His voice stayed level. Nox’Thar. The trials. The prison break. The camp. Prisoners. Void beasts set on humans and anthros alike. Anthros who were not in on it. Humans who were. The resistance as the thing standing in the middle, not the thing holding the match. The footage was believed, AI had currently not advanced enough to fake things to such a degree, but talk of special effects and editing still lingered.

He let that sit. Then he looked into the close camera.

“What you are about to see is graphic,” he said. “It has not been cut. As far as we know, nobody has ever been filmed doing this. I was human. This is the night I stopped being one, and I did it because I believe in anthros and the fight for us, I did it because humans I care about were getting hurt, and as a human I wasn’t powerful enough to stop it. And ... because I love Roan. The pack’s Alpha.”