The offices of the Bureau of Therianthrope Control had been hastily erected just outside the Denver city limits at the same time Sanctuary was built, a prefabricated barracks for a small army of bureaucrats and paper-shufflers. They’d been promised a proper building as soon as their budget allowed it.

Four years later, the rain still comes in every window and the air conditioning still quits if you look at it funny.

Of course, we have more important items in our budget than our own comfort. 

I just wish we actually spent the money on them.

BTC Agent Jason Rayvern slumped in his chair, staring dully at his compstation. An oscillating fan stirred the air without relieving the August heat in the least. A butterfly landed on one of the flowers in the vase he kept on the low shelf across the room, making him smile. “All right for some,” he said aloud. “I’ve got a meeting in five minutes. Lucky me.”

The butterfly lingered on the flower for a few moments, then flapped away out the window. Jason watched it out of sight before sitting up and finger-combing his prematurely graying brown hair into some semblance of order. His eighteen-hour days, mostly on his feet, kept him trim, but also left dark circles under his deep blue eyes.

Or possibly that’s the effects of what I see every day of the week. 

He’d conquered his tendency towards five o’clock shadow by growing a beard, but he couldn’t do much about what he’d once seen described as an “internal scruffiness field.” Simply put, Jason Rayvern looked permanently untidy, no matter what care he took with his appearance. In deference to that, he wore the most casual clothing he could get away with, which in this weather was a short-sleeved polo shirt and tan jeans.

Most people only need to see me in a suit once before they tell me to dress the way I want to from now on.

His meeting, now three minutes away, was with his new boss, the sixth Chief Agent of the past four years. Two of the previous five had resigned under pressure: one from a past evading taxes and selling minor political offices, which had kept him in little luxuries while he was a governor but caught up to him at last; the other, who’d been the previous incumbent, from a desired future he’d recorded in memos which had been leaked to a theri-rights group. Americans might not want theris in their backyards or their schools, but neither were most of them willing to condone leaving a man in charge of Sanctuary who’d written that he hoped he could someday push the button which would activate every theri’s poison chip at once.

Good riddance to him, and to the other one. He was trying to run the Bureau the way he used to run his state. No wonder they’re nearly bankrupt now. As for the other three...

The other three Chiefs had quit their jobs in disgust when they realized the post meant long hours, little power, less pay, and no thanks from anyone. Any move they made, whether it was designed to improve the lives of the theris of Sanctuary or keep them under more stringent controls, would be too extreme for one side and not enough for the other. They were also prime targets for ridicule by the media, with one comedian declaring that anyone who would devote his life to caring for theris must be a passer, and picking out the form he believed each successive Chief was concealing.

He doesn’t know how right he is. Jason locked his compstation and headed out the door. There’s at least two passers in the department that I know of. But as they used to say, don’t ask, don’t tell...

As if this weren’t enough, the BTC had very little actual power over the way local police departments handled cases of therianthropy. Though official shoot-to-kill policies were illegal, Jason had no doubt a majority of the unofficial policies were precisely that. There simply wasn’t the money to place a BTC agent in every little town, or even in some of the smaller cities, and ordinary cops felt themselves well out of their depth when confronted with something that defied all laws of nature.

It’s a miracle so many of them make it here alive. And when you add that some of them are still sane... well, I could almost believe in God for that one, if sheer human stubbornness didn’t explain it just as well.

Jason stopped outside his destination and knocked on the closed door.

Enough philosophy. Time to meet the boss.

“Come in!” called a woman’s voice.

Again.

Richard Doherty, new Chief Agent of the BTC, paced up and down the one clear strip of floor in his office. The rest of it was covered with boxes, as yet unpacked. He was waiting to see if it was worth it.

“That job eats people alive,” they said. “All the agents are either deadwood or part of some faction,” they said. “You’ll only last if you keep your head down and stay out of the way,” they said.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

He thought he might already have made an important inroad. Judging by the look on his administrative assistant’s face that morning, no one had brought her flowers in quite some time. Of course, it might also have been prompted by his order about the building’s air conditioning.

Judging by this—Rick rapped his fingers against the window-mounted AC unit as he passed it—one of my predecessors found what he thought was a nifty way to balance his own comfort and the bottom line. Apparently he didn’t care that anyone who came to see him in here would be able to tell he didn’t give a rat’s behind for the rest of the Bureau.

That stops now.

He hoped to heaven he wasn’t just being young and idealistic. Most of the people he’d talked to had said he was.

But if you can’t be young and idealistic when you’re twenty-eight, when can you be?

A muffled knock sent his thoughts out the window. Running a nervous hand through dark auburn hair, he sat down at the desk and tried to look professional. The man he’d asked to come see him, though several years younger than himself, was the one he’d heard most often mentioned as the likely leader of the pro-theri faction within the BTC.

Which means he’s an important man to have on my side.

Here’s hoping he likes what I have to say.

Jason smiled at the ponytailed, bespectacled woman sitting behind the utilitarian desk as he let himself into the outer office of the Chief Agent of the BTC.  Alisa Hall had outlasted almost as many Chiefs as Jason himself, coming to the Bureau with the second Chief and staying on after he’d left.

He cared too much without having the guts to do what needed to be done. Broke his heart and went home to write sappy-tragic romance novels about couples who’re torn apart by one or both of their prototherianthropomorphosis. Despite his overall pessimistic mood, he grinned. Try saying that five times fast!

Alisa wiggled her fingers at him. “Look what I have,” she said, tapping a vase full of lilies which sat on the corner of her desk. “Come sniff, they’re wonderful.”

“Who got you those?” Jason asked, coming over to sniff as ordered and scowling at her when he was done. She giggled. “Do you have some boyfriend I don’t know about?” he demanded. “Whoever he is, he’d better treat you well or he’ll be answering to me!”

“No, no boyfriend,” Alisa managed to say, getting her laughter under control. “Mr. Doherty brought them in. And gave me free rein to get the building’s ventilation systems taken care of. ‘By the end of next week and I don’t care what it costs,’ he said.”

Jason raised his eyebrows. Could it be...

Ruthlessly, he squashed the nascent hope. No. He’s trying to make a good first impression, that’s all. Chiefs don’t last around here, especially not young ones.

The irony of calling a man young who could give him nearly five years occurred to Jason, but chronology notwithstanding, Doherty didn’t understand the challenges of the job he’d just taken.

They never do.

So it just remains to see if we’ll regret his leaving or celebrate it.

“How’re the odds running?” he asked Alisa in a low tone.

“Eight gets you ten he’s gone in six months,” she answered the same way.

“That low?”

“He seems like a tough one.” Alisa glanced at the door to the inner office. “You betting on his leaving?”

“Don’t I always?”

“Then I’ll take it.” She pulled a ten-dollar bill from her pocket and opened her desk drawer. Jason added a five and three ones of his own, and Alisa shut and locked the drawer. Whichever of them won the bet got to choose the restaurant where the cash would be spent. So far, Jason had introduced his friend to five of the exotic cuisines Denver had to offer.

Have to start thinking about number six...

“Am I presentable?” he asked when Alisa had put her keys away.

“Hold still.” She twitched his collar into a better line and repositioned a piece of hair. “Now you are.”

“Thanks.” Straightening his back, Jason went to the inner door and knocked.

Keep your objectives in mind, Rayvern. Remember who you work for.

Who you really work for, at the end of the day.

A sweet, smiling face framed by fair hair came unbidden to his mind, and his expression softened for one instant before the “Come in!” from the office hardened it again.

Maybe I can see her tonight, if this goes well.

Call it a reward.

He opened the door and entered.

“Rayvern, sir,” said the man at the door, throwing what could charitably have been called a salute. His voice had a trace of an accent to it, as though he’d been born overseas or spent a lot of time there, and if Rick hadn’t already known the man’s age, he would have pegged him as several years older than Rick himself, rather than those same years younger.

Is it this job that’s made him go gray like that? Not the most pleasant thought in the world...

“Have a seat, Rayvern,” he said aloud, returning the salute with studied casualness. “Chief or Doherty will do if you need something to call me. ‘Sir’ makes me look for my father.”

“Got it, Chief.”

Oh, very good, Rick acknowledged silently as Rayvern plopped into a chair with the grace of a family dog after a five-mile walk. Past master of the sarcastic tone, aren’t you?

Let’s see how you take this one.

“Who’s not pulling their weight around here?” he asked. “And don’t tell me no one, because I’ve seen the payroll, and I’ve seen the volume of work that gets done. Either everyone’s engraving it all by hand—and making the paper first—or there’s some serious dead weight in this office.”

Rayvern goggled at him for an instant, then started reeling off names. Rick stopped him around the third one, pulled out his palmputer, and set it to receive direct from Rayvern’s link. As he watched, a dozen names came up on the screen, the ‘puter already cross-referencing them with the payroll file.

I probably could have found these out myself, but it’d have taken longer. This way, I get them all gone at once, and he gets to feel like I’m useful. Though I’ll be double-checking before I do anything, just to be sure he’s not taking the chance to get rid of the people who don’t agree with his stance.

“Excellent,” he said, saving the list when it was complete. “That ought to free up some money for what actually matters around here. Do you know what that is?”

Rayvern gave an ‘enlighten me’ shrug.

“This is the Bureau of Therianthrope Control, is it not? But I’d say the theris are plenty controlled, what with the walls and the guards and the chips in their shoulders. So we must have another reason for being, and look at that! We make sure to drop food in for them, to keep them alive!” Against the odds, Rick was enjoying this. Rayvern was so obviously expecting resistance at every turn that it was far more amusing than it should have been to watch him looking for the catch in Rick’s words. “But tell me this, Agent—why do we do it so seldom?”

Rayvern sat up straight, and the steel in his eyes cut through Rick’s flippancy. Suddenly he understood why he’d been warned about the younger man. Rayvern had the capacity to be very, very dangerous if provoked.

And I think I’ve just found one of his keys.

“Because, Chief, most of the men who kept that chair warm before you couldn’t find the part of them that rests on it with both hands and a map,” Rayvern said sharply, biting off his final consonants. “And the last one we had was trying to use starvation to get the theris to start killing each other en masse, so he could argue that they should be put down like any uncontrollable animals.”

The last Chief Agent here... that’s right, he was found to have authored those memos...

Rick was no longer in any doubt as to how the memos had gotten to the outside world. He was only surprised the man had lasted as long as he had.

“Well, obviously that didn’t work,” he said, tapping out an order on his palmputer and aiming it at his compstation to get them interfaced. “So effective immediately, the food drops are doubled. Four times a week, not two. And is it true the theris have divided up into groups?”

“Packs,” Rayvern supplied, though his eyes were still wide in surprise. “Th—we call ‘em packs.”

“Packs, then,” Rick said, as if he hadn’t noticed Rayvern’s slip.

But I did, and how very interesting it is...

“Do they have territories, do you know?” he asked. “Or do they roam?”

“Territories, mostly. They fight over borders sometimes, but unless somebody dies, it doesn’t shift much.”

“And you could point out where the territories are on a map?”

Rayvern nodded warily.

“Then do it, and make sure there’s at least one drop well inside each pack’s land. Let me know when you have the map ready so we can get the first drop out as soon as possible.” Rick turned to his compstation, starting to type on the inset keyboard. It was gibberish, but Rayvern didn’t need to know that. He did need to know he was dismissed.

And it’ll help if he doesn’t realize I have my screen set to show me the feed from the camera hidden in my nameplate. 

“Got it, Chief,” said Rayvern, standing up and saluting. This one had more snap in it, and the words held only the barest trace of irony. Moving in a purposeful lope, the dark-haired man left the office, shutting the door behind him.

Rick let himself sag against the back of his chair. I think that went well.

Now, to find the slack in the budget that will pay for these extra drops until I can finish reviewing those deadwood names he gave me and finding reasons to get them out of here if that’s what they turn out to be...

If he was going to be eaten alive, at least he was going to enjoy it.

Jason leaned against the corner of Alisa’s desk and held down the call button on his link as she started her electric kettle going for tea, making a hissing racket not three feet from him.

“Hufflin here,” said the mature male voice in his ear.

“Gunny, it’s Ray. We’ve got a live one this time. I need either you or Adam on the gate tonight.” Jason flicked one glance around the room before finishing his thought. “I’m going in.”