Page 34 of Laundering Down the Legions
"She wasn't there," Grayson said, clinical. "But someone else was."
"Not that bitch again." I said.
"I didn't know who Maren's handler was until just before I called Grayson in." Kearan watched me close, tracking whether the fury was about to tip into something he couldn't manage. "They have an entire collection of people… a network that believes in the same thing. Means, opportunity, and motive."
"Motive being she hates me."
"Motive being bigger than that. We'll come back to it." He moved to the second set of files. Toxicology now, chemical breakdowns, bonding-mechanism analysis. "The inhibitor wasn't random. It was engineered, specifically, to interrupt the mating mechanism at the neurological level. Whoever built it understood Agenti biology in detail. The kind that comes from formal training, not field guesswork. They identified the exact pathways involved in mate bonding, calculated the molecular structure to interrupt signal transmission, and built something that could be administered over time without causing systemic failure."
"That's not amateur," I said.
"That's someone with medical credentials or military clearance. Someone who studied shifter bonding at a level most people never touch."
Grayson's pencil moved, not taking notes, calculating, his eyes going unfocused. "You already know who," he said.
Kearan nodded.
"So do I," I said, and the name was already on my tongue. "Maren Voss."
Kearan didn't flinch. That was the thing. He'd been standing here holding the knowledge of what Maren engineered, what she'd put in my body deliberately and consistently, and his voice stayed level. "Yes."
And the whole thing reorganized. Evelyn had access, sure. But Evelyn wasn't a healer. She didn't have the neurobiology to build a compound that interrupts shifter bonding. She was the handler. Maren was the architect.
Maren Voss, who Kearan had saved. Who he'd pulled burns into his own skin to keep alive. Who he'd let the team misunderstand because protecting that story was easier than digging up the truth. She'd designed the thing that had ruined my bond with Ryker. Calculated the doses. Handed the recipe to someone with access to my food.
"Tell me what it actually does," I said.
He pulled a document that read like a thesis, diagrams, flowcharts. "Agenti bonding is neurologically coordinated. Multiple mates, multiple neural pathways, and those pathways strengthen with proximity and intention and the feedback loops that make up a bond. The more complete the connection, the stronger each bond gets." He pointed. "This compound interrupts transmission at the synapse. Small consistent doses cause minor disruption, confusion, some emotional dysregulation, nothing that reads as sabotage because you'd chalk it up to stress. Those doses over time stop the synapses firing right. The pathways don't strengthen. The bonding stalls."
"So I've been eating something that's been keeping my bonds from completing."
"Exactly," he said, pulling my own medical records.
"Why," I said. "Why not just poison me outright? Or just kill me?"
He moved to the third set of files, and this was the bigger shape, the thing that made the small pieces line up. "Because an Agenti with incomplete mate bonds lives in constant neurological imbalance. The bonding drive never resolves. If you'd died, then they'd only turned Trux and Seph. They want an entire functional team."
He laid out redacted records, where names and dates were missing, but the info was there.
"Incomplete bonding, in theory, done with an entire pack, would keep the pact structure. There were rumors about tests like this years ago, but I never believed them."
The room went quiet.
"Trux," I said.
"Trux's Hesolga has been carefully calculated" He pulled the last file. No evidence inside. A photograph. A memorandum. An order out of the inner Division faction. Maintain operative asset in controlled state. Asset designation: berserker, controlled. Operational value: high. Recommendation: maintain frenzied state to preserve operational utility through pack dynamics.
"A controlled berserker," I said.
"Someone figured out that an Agenti in advanced Hesolga has operational value. Enhanced strength, no inhibition against violence, useful anywhere controlled aggression is required. So instead of letting Trux resolve his Hesolga, instead of letting the bonds complete and stabilize him, they decided keeping him at the threshold was worth more. And the only way to hold him there was to keep the entire pack frenzied. Likely there were going to abduct or kill you before you finished the bond with the last mate so we all stayed this way forever. Or until we rip ourselves apart."
"Under orders from Maren," I said.
"Taking orders from whoever sits above both of them. But Maren built it and Evelyn deployed it."
He didn't say anything for a second. Just looked at the files like they'd betrayed him. Maybe they had.
"Maren Voss engineered a poison to keep Trux deteriorating on a schedule so the inner faction would have a berserker team on tap," I said, slow and cold. "She built it knowing it would push Trux toward the exact rage that made him useful, and the restof you." The fury landed then, not the explosive kind, the cold architectural kind that knows exactly what it's aiming at.
