The confrontation happened on the second morning back.Elias had been expecting it. Fenris had the particular, coiled quality of a problem that was gathering rather than resolving, and the success of the facility rescue — instead of defusing him — had seemed to make things worse. There was a type of person, in both human and lycan form, who experienced other people's competence as a personal grievance.Elias had known hunters like that. He recognized the posture.It happened at the edge of the camp, in the hour after dawn, when most of the others were occupied with the captives' morning care or the hunters' quiet, methodical tending of their equipment. Fenris came out of the treeline the way he always seemed to come out of things — suddenly, with the full weight of his presence arriving before any announcement of intent."Walk with me," he said.It was not phrased as a request.Elias set down what he was doing and walked.The forest closed behind them. A hundred meters from camp, Fenr

Vael was the first of the captives to speak at length.She did it not to Elias, but to Ronan — which was the correct instinct, the instinct of someone who understood lycan hierarchy and knew that an alpha's recognition was the thing that returned you to yourself after a long time of being made to feel like nothing. She found Ronan on the third morning of their return journey and she spoke to him for a long time, her voice low and careful, rebuilding language the way you rebuild a fire after rain.Elias watched from a distance. He was learning to watch from distances.What Vael described — and he learned the shape of it afterward, from Maren, who had been close enough to hear — was a geography of the network's operations that went beyond what Soren had provided. She had been inside the facility longer. She had seen more of it, in the way that captives come to know the architecture of their captivity in exhaustive, involuntary detail.There were six facilities, not one. The one they had

They came from four territories.Elias watched them arrive over the course of the day before the council — small groups, mostly in human form, moving with the disciplined wariness of people who did not typically share the same space and were doing so now because the alternative was worse. Three alphas besides Ronan. A fourth sent a representative, a compact, sharp-eyed female named Briss, who announced on arrival that her alpha would commit to nothing without full intelligence, and then sat down in the designated observation position and watched everything with the focused intensity of someone being paid by the detail.Thomas and his hunters were already there. The rescue had changed their status in ways that Elias could see but that no one had articulated yet — they were no longer treated as threats, but they were not treated as allies. They occupied a middle ground, a kind of cautious respect that was given not to what they were but to what they had done.It was a start.Soren he ke

Soren had a method.Elias watched it over the following days with genuine admiration — the systematic, methodical way she built intelligence from fragments. She worked with Vael, who had seen the paperwork. She worked with the other rescued captives, who had overheard things, remembered details that had seemed meaningless at the time and now cohered into a picture. She worked with Briss, the northern representative, who had been tracking network activity in her territory for years and whose records, when laid beside Soren's, began to reveal a pattern.The network moved certain materials — specific types of equipment, specific categories of personnel — on a different logistics chain from the rest. Separate vehicles. Separate schedules. Supply lines that went south rather than east or west.South was unusual. The network's infrastructure was overwhelmingly concentrated in the temperate zones. South meant either maritime access or extreme altitude or — and this was Soren's hypothesis, ex

He didn't sleep that night.Not because of anxiety — or not only that. Partly because the camp was alive in the particular way that a camp is alive the night before it moves: people quietly checking equipment, low conversations, the periodic check-ins of the watch, all of it producing a low hum of purposeful wakefulness that made sleep feel like a misfiling.He lay on his back and looked at the sky through the trees and thought.He thought about Hazel and Mark. He hadn't thought about them in days, which was itself something — the way the current of the present can carry you so far from the past that you look up and are surprised by how much distance has accumulated. They were real people, in a real community, living real lives that had nothing to do with lycans or networks or the complicated inheritance of his blood.He had been angry at them. He had moved through the anger the way you move through a region — it took time, it had terrain, it was different in different places. At the