Excerpts and story samples

Eight weeks before the weighing, they all sat down to review the record...

The Fracture

Hambden, Ohio, September 2027

"I need to say something difficult," Itzamna told the table, closing his notebook with a deliberateness that made everyone stop what they were doing. "I've been reluctant to raise it, because I know precisely how it will sound."

"Say it," Josh said.

"The cases that touch on grief, on parental love, on a family trying and failing and trying again to hold together, consistently carry more generous weight in our record than the cases that don't. I went back through every entry, comparing the language we used, and the pattern holds across twenty-one cases." He did not look away. "I don't think this is coincidence, Josh. I think it traces back to the question you raised with us in the Smokies, whether your love for this species compromises your capacity to judge it. I believed you that night that the doubt itself was proof you hadn't fallen into the trap. I'm no longer certain that belief survives contact with the record."

The kitchen went very quiet.

"You're saying I've been biasing the cases," Josh said, carefully.

"I'm saying I don't think any of us is well positioned to tell, from inside our own affection for you. That is the problem with a chair who loves the subject this completely. The safeguard that's supposed to catch this kind of drift, four independent witnesses checking each other, has been quietly compromised by how much all four of us care about protecting you from this exact conversation."

Lilith's chair scraped back before she had fully decided to stand. "That's not fair, Itzy."

"It might not be fair. I think honesty matters more right now, and I have spent a week trying to talk myself out of this precisely because I knew how you'd react. That tells me something uncomfortable about how much this team has learned to avoid saying true things that might upset Josh."

Josh had gone very still. When he spoke, his voice carried none of the defensiveness Lilith had braced for.

"Stop," he said, gently, to both of them. "Itzamna's right to raise it. Lilith, I need you to let him be right, even though I understand exactly why that's hard."

"Josh."

"Please."