I thought about the wolves who'd left. Faces I'd learned. Names I'd memorized. Wolves who'd come to the compound carrying everything they owned because someone had told them that Rhea's territory was a place where rogues could live like pack wolves without selling their autonomy.

They'd believed it. And now they were walking away, not because the promise was broken but because the promise couldn't be kept if there wasn't food on the table.

"Sera?" I asked.

"Furious. And scared, though she wouldn't say it." Torren picked up his report. "She's holding her core group — the eighty who've been with her from the beginning. But they're watching. If more leave, the core starts cracking."

* * *

The days compressed. Each one shorter than the last — not in hours but in options.

Week three: the last friendly pack cut contact. A single message, apologetic, delivered through a channel that closed as soon as the message was read. We can't. Council is watching. We're sorry. No signature. No return address. The anonymous farewell of people who cared but not enough to risk their own standing.

Week four: Torren reduced rations. Not dramatically — a ten-percent cut, distributed across the compound, presented as a "seasonal adjustment" that nobody believed was seasonal. The wolves accepted it. They accepted it the way wolves accept hard things — with the quiet discipline of people who'd been through worse and knew that complaining didn't make the food appear.

Lily noticed. Not the rations — the mood. She came to me one evening while I was reading Torren's latest report, climbed onto the chair beside me, and put her hand on my arm.

"Everyone's wolves are tight," she said.

"Tight?"

"Like they're holding something in. Like when you hold your breath."

Seven years old. Reading the emotional state of two hundred and sixty wolves through a sense that no one else in the territory possessed. Describing collective anxiety with the vocabulary of a child because she didn't have the words for what she was feeling.

"People are worried," I said.

"About food?"

"About a lot of things."

She looked at me. The silver threads in her hair. The eyes that saw things no one else could see. "Can I help?"

"You're helping just by being here."

It wasn't enough. I knew it. She knew it — not the strategy, not the politics, but the emotional truth of it. She could feel the compound's anxiety and she wanted to fix it and the only thing I could tell her was that her existence was enough, which was the kind of answer that adults gave children when the real answer was too heavy.

* * *

Dusk. The compound wall. I stood on the eastern rampart and looked out at the territory.

Fewer lights than a month ago. The satellite camps that Sera's groups had occupied were dark — abandoned, the fire pits cold, the shelters emptying as wolves drifted away one group at a time. The main compound was still populated, still functioning, still alive. But the edges were fraying. The territory that had housed three hundred wolves was contracting toward its center, the way a body pulls blood toward vital organs when the extremities start to fail.

Kieran came up the stairs. Stood beside me. We looked at the diminishing territory together — the view that told the story of what Total Isolation meant, not in reports or numbers but in the actual visual of a world getting smaller.

"We can release the records," he said. "Right now. Every pack. Send copies through whatever channels are still open. Let the truth do the work."

I'd thought about it. Every day for the past two weeks, I'd thought about it. The extermination order. The forty-seven names. The operational directives. The evidence that Council's entire civilization was built on a genocide so complete that even the people living inside it didn't know it had happened.

Release it, and every wolf in the world would know. Every Alpha. Every elder. Every pack member who'd been told that the territorial system was natural, inevitable, the way things had always been. They'd learn that it wasn't. They'd learn what it cost.