"And then what?" I said. "Panic. Chaos. Wolves abandoning packs with no plan. No structure to catch them. Cubs and families in the middle of a collapse that nobody prepared for." I looked at the darkening territory. "It would hurt the people we're trying to help."

"So we hold it."

"We hold it. But we don't hold it forever."

The light faded. The compound below us — wolves moving through the evening routine, fires lit for cooking, the sounds of a community that was functioning but afraid. Functioning because the fear hadn't broken anything yet. Afraid because the walls were closing and no one could see the door.

"We need something more than a document," I said. "The evidence proves what they did. But it's six hundred years old. Council can deny it. Claim it's forged. Call it propaganda from a rogue territory that's trying to undermine legitimate governance." I looked at Kieran. "We need proof. Not historical. Current. Something that shows the world what Firstborn actually is — not the threat Council says it is, but what it really does."

"What kind of proof?"

I didn't answer immediately. I was looking south. Past the wall. Past the tree line. Into the darkness where Aldric's containment team was still camped — four specialists with silver-alloy equipment, watching, waiting for the opportunity that Council's patience was designed to create.

They'd been there for weeks. Watching. Their wolves trained to suppress Firstborn response, equipped with tools designed to capture and contain. They were the sharp end of the system — the part that Council sent when isolation wasn't enough, when the slow knife needed a faster blade.

I had an idea. It had been forming since the conversation with Aldric — since he'd sat across from me and told me that the world would change if Lily grew up. Since he'd said what she IS matters and I'd said I see WHO she is and neither of us had moved.

The idea scared me.

"Rhea." Kieran's voice. He'd seen my face. He'd read the thing behind it — the calculation that wasn't a military calculation, wasn't a political calculation. A mother's calculation. The math of a woman deciding whether to put her daughter in front of the thing that wanted to take her.

"Not tonight," I said. "I need to think."

"About what?"

I looked at him. The man who stood beside me on walls and in command rooms and in the spaces between decisions where the weight was heaviest. The man who'd been scared — who'd said it out loud, the first time in his life — because a piece of paper with five words on it had told him his daughter was the enemy.

"About what Lily can do," I said. "Not what she is. What she can do. And whether I have the right to ask her to do it."

The night settled. The compound below. The territory shrinking. The containment team in the south. The evidence in the cabinet. The stone tablets on the shelf. The truth, held like a weapon — loaded, aimed, waiting for the moment when holding it wasn't enough and using it became the only choice left.

Somewhere in our quarters, Lily was drawing. Three wolves. The same three. The family that existed at the center of a world that was closing around them like a fist.

I had an idea. It scared me. And I was going to do it anyway.

Not because it was safe. Because the alternative — watching the territory starve while I held a truth that could change the world and a daughter whose existence proved the truth was more than history — was worse than fear.

The wall was cold under my hands. The night was quiet. The decision was forming.

Tomorrow, I would tell them.