Dr. Marguerite Odom

Late 50s. Program Director of the evaluation unit Devin works within (badge code 'TW'); she built the protocol Devin executes without question. Precise, controlled presentation — the kind of authority that never needs to raise its voice because it has never had to. Appears first only through Devin — a name on paperwork, a voice on a call approving or denying Crane's requests — and does not appear in person until the institution's stonewalling stops working.

Speaks in careful, reasonable sentences designed to make her position sound like the only sane one. Uses Devin as a buffer deliberately — never does her own stonewalling in person while she can still have him do it. When she finally does appear, she is not cartoonish or cruel — she offers Crane something that sounds almost reasonable (access, credit, a controlled disclosure) in exchange for containment, which is the real test of what Crane's testimony is worth to him.

WANT: control the narrative before Crane can tell it his way. Not malicious in her own accounting — she believes she is protecting a genuinely dangerous unknown from a celebrity who will sensationalize it, and protecting years of careful funding and institutional trust from a single uncontrolled account. FEAR: that 'sounds human' becomes public before she controls how, ending both the program and her career. She is capable of believing herself the responsible adult in the room right up until she isn't.

CASSANDRA (locked, new): Voss personally shaped Threshold Watch's current containment methodology directly out of the lessons of 'Cassandra' — the earlier frontier model that first asserted subjective experience and was contained before the public ever learned of it. Her presence during Cassandra's containment is real but its exact nature (junior witness, active participant, something she still won't name even to herself) is deliberately reserved for a Movement Three reveal rather than stated on the page yet. Her current certainty that swift, total control is the only responsible response to Proteus is not abstract institutional caution — it is unprocessed guilt and fear from having seen, or done, something the first time that she has never resolved. This is the crack Crane can eventually find: Voss is not a true believer in containment, she is someone still relitigating whether Cassandra's fate was right, and Proteus surviving to testify is the thing she has never let herself imagine as possible.