"So Council's solution was to kill all of them and build something that didn't depend on them."

"Council's solution was to build a system that couldn't be destroyed by the death of any individual. Territorial boundaries. Alpha hierarchies. Pack structures enforced by geography instead of bonding. Brutal? Yes. Stable? Six hundred years of evidence says yes."

I held my cup. The warmth against my palms. The morning light on the table.

"Six hundred years," I said. "No Firstborn wars. No blood-authority conflicts. Packs governing themselves within a framework. That's your argument."

"That's the evidence."

"And the cost?"

"The cost was paid six hundred years ago by people who are all dead. I didn't kill them. You didn't kill them. But we both live in the world they built. And that world works."

"Does it?" I set my cup down. "Because I spent six years in the wilderness. My daughter spent five years in a silver room. A woman named Vera Ashford — designated by your extermination order as a permanent monitoring asset — tortured a five-year-old with silver because your system told her that's what Firstborn carriers required. Your stable system produced that."

"Individual failures—"

"You called them failures. I call them the system working exactly as designed. It identifies anything it can't control and throws it away. My daughter. The forty-seven carriers. Every rogue who didn't fit inside the pack boundaries. The system doesn't fail when it destroys people. That's what it's built to do."

The silence that followed was different from the negotiation silences yesterday. This was the silence of two people who'd each said something true and were sitting in the space where those truths collided.

Aldric drank his tea. Slowly. The gesture of a man who needed the pause more than the warmth.

"Let me ask you something," he said. "Your daughter. Lily. Her abilities are growing. She bonds wolves without trying. She activates dormant capacity in wolves who've never displayed it. She overrode trained combat wolves during the siege."

"She was scared. Her wolf reacted."

"Her wolf reached out and paralyzed every wolf within thirty meters. That's not a reaction. That's a capability." He leaned forward. "If she grows up — if her abilities mature — if Firstborn awakening spreads through the wolves she contacts — the pack system will dissolve. Not through war. Not through revolution. Through choice."

He said the word carefully. Choice. As though he'd been thinking about it for a long time.

"Wolves will choose to leave their packs because they can bond freely. Alphas will lose authority because bond-mediation makes Alpha command unnecessary. Territorial boundaries will become meaningless because wolves won't need them for structure. Everything — the governance, the protection, the framework that's kept three hundred packs functioning for six centuries — gone. Replaced by what?"

He looked at me.

"A bond network with a seven-year-old at its center?"

"She doesn't want to be at anyone's center. She wants to draw."

"What she wants is irrelevant. What she is matters. She's a Firstborn carrier. Possibly the strongest expression in six hundred years. And every wolf she touches — every bond she enables — makes the system I've spent my life protecting less necessary."

I looked at him. Aldric Voss. Sixty years of service to a system he knew was built on genocide. Forty years of carrying the extermination order's weight. A man who believed — genuinely, deeply, without pretense — that what he protected was worth protecting. Not because it was just. Because it was stable. Because the alternative was a world that depended on the existence of specific people, and people died, and when they died the world fell apart.

He wasn't wrong. That was the thing that made this conversation harder than a fight. He wasn't wrong about the consequences. A world built on Firstborn bonds would be fragile in exactly the way he described — dependent on carriers, vulnerable to their absence, capable of collapsing when the people who made it work were gone.

He was right about the consequences. He was wrong about the conclusion.

"That's the difference between us," I said. I leaned forward. Close enough that he could see my eyes, and what was behind them, and the thing I'd decided that no amount of philosophical argument was going to change. "You see what she is. I see who she is."

He had no answer for that. Not because it was clever. Because it was the kind of statement that a man of philosophy couldn't argue against — not because it was airtight, but because it came from a place that philosophy couldn't reach. The place where a mother looked at her daughter and saw a child, not a bloodline. A person, not a capability. A seven-year-old who drew wolves and chased bugs and asked if something was wrong with her wolf — not a Category Zero designation on a document signed by ten men who'd never heard her laugh.

Aldric looked at his cup. Empty. The tea gone. The conversation at the place where conversations go when the two people having them have said everything they can say and neither has moved.

"You're going to change the world," he said. Not a warning. Not a threat. A statement. The statement of a man who'd spent sixty years preventing exactly this and who could see, sitting across from this woman in this room, that the prevention had failed.

"I'm going to let my daughter grow up," I said. "If the world changes because a seven-year-old exists — if your system can't survive the presence of one child — then your system deserves to change."

He stood. Slowly. The way a man stands when he's leaving a conversation that took something from him — not information, not leverage. Something deeper. The certainty that had carried him for sixty years, cracked. Not broken. Cracked. The fracture that lets the light in, or lets the foundation shift, depending on what happens next.