"Yes."

"Was invented to stop people like Lily."

"Not like Lily specifically. Like all Firstborn carriers. The pack-boundary system was built to prevent Firstborn-style bonds from returning. If wolves can't interact freely across pack lines, a Firstborn can't activate the dormant bonding capacity in other wolves."

"So they weren't just controlling territory." Sera looked at the blank screen where the extermination order had been displayed. "They were controlling who could bond with whom. For six hundred years. Every pack. Every Alpha. Every wolf who was told that the boundaries were natural — they were living inside a system that was built on the murder of forty-seven people, including children, because those people's blood made the boundaries unnecessary."

Nobody corrected her. Nobody added nuance. There was no nuance to add.

I looked at the screen. The blank surface where the child's name had been. Carrier 31. Eight years old. Eliminated.

"Rhea." Kieran's voice. Quiet. The voice he used when he wanted to make sure I heard what he was saying and not what I was feeling.

I looked at him.

"What do we do with this?"

I thought about Lily. In our quarters. Drawing. The wooden wolf beside her. The silver threads in her hair. Seven years old. The same age as Carrier 31 minus one year. The same blood. The same ability. The same thing that Council had decided, six hundred years ago, was worth killing children to eliminate.

"Council doesn't get to decide what my daughter becomes," I said. "They didn't earn that right six hundred years ago when they murdered children. They don't have it now."

"The question is what we do with the evidence."

I looked at Sera. At Torren. At Kieran. The four of us in a room with the proof of what Council had built its entire civilization on — not a political charter, not a governance document. An extermination order. Signed and executed and concealed for six centuries while every wolf alive lived inside the system it had created.

"We hold it," I said. "We hold it until we know what it means. Not just what they did — we know what they did. We need to understand why. Why Firstborn bonds were so threatening that the only response was extermination. What Council was actually afraid of."

Sera looked at me. The look of a woman who'd been given the answer to a question she'd been asking for ten years and was still deciding whether the answer made things better or worse.

"And then?"

"Then we decide when the world is ready to see it."

Kieran was beside me. Not touching — standing close enough that the space between us held the shape of contact. The nearness that had become its own language over the past months.

"We know what they did," he said.

"And we hold it," I said.

He looked at me. I looked at him. The room. The evidence. The weight of six hundred years of concealment sitting in a drive smaller than a coin, carried out of Council headquarters by a man who was now in restraints because he'd chosen to stay when Kieran had asked him to.

"Together," he said.

"Together."

Torren cleared his throat. The practical sound of a man who'd just heard something that changed the foundations of his world and was already thinking about logistics.

"What about Nolan?" he asked.

Kieran's face didn't change. But something behind it did — the thing he'd been holding down since he found the emergency drop at dawn. The weight of a man who'd asked his best friend to stay inside a machine built on the bones of murdered children, and whose best friend had done it, and had paid for it.

"We get him back," Kieran said.

"How?"

"I don't know yet." His voice was flat. Stripped. The voice of a man who was going to figure it out because the alternative was something he couldn't carry. "But we get him back."

I put my hand on his arm. One touch. Brief. The contact that said: yes. We do.

Sera stood. Walked to the door. Stopped.

"Rhea."

"Yes."

"The proof you wanted. The facts I asked for." She looked back at me. Not the Sera who'd questioned the alliance. Not the Sera who'd wavered when Council offered her legitimacy. A different Sera — the one who'd spent ten years fighting a system she thought was unjust and had just learned it was worse than that. "You have them now."

"I know."

"My wolves aren't going anywhere."

She left. The door closed.

I looked at Kieran. He looked at me. Torren stood at the door, waiting for orders that hadn't come yet, patient in the way that Torren was patient with everything — the patience of a man who didn't need the order to understand what was coming next.

We had the extermination order. The proof. The forty-seven names and the operational directives and the follow-up procedures that had shaped six centuries of wolf civilization.

We had the truth.

Now we had to decide what to do with it.