The reception the network had prepared was not what Elias had expected.He had expected a strike team. Personnel left behind with orders to engage, to complicate the extraction, to buy time for whatever the network was moving out through the other egress points. That was the rational play — make the extraction costly, force a decision about speed versus thoroughness.What he found instead, when Luna and Ronan had cleared the facility's upper levels, was something that took him longer to understand.They had left the data.Not just the captives — the data. The archive. The physical records that Dr. Calla had told him were stored here: the hand-written files from the network's founding years, the original research documentation, the bloodline records going back three generations. All of it still in the archive room on the third level, in fireproof storage cases, untouched."They didn't take it," Soren said. She was standing in the archive room with her arms at her sides, looking at the

Dawn came through the Pale House's narrow ventilation slits as a series of thin, pale lines on the opposite wall.Elias had not slept. He suspected a significant portion of the coalition hadn't either — not from anxiety but from the particular wakefulness of people who have arrived at a significant juncture and need to be present for it. The last hours of the night had been occupied with the sustained, unglamorous work that followed the dramatic: triaging injuries, cataloguing the captive population, securing the facility's perimeter against any belated network response, managing the human needs of sixty-odd people who had just experienced something that defied simple categorisation.The captive count was thirty-one.More than he had expected. More than the manifest Dr. Calla had seen suggested — which meant either the manifest had been incomplete or new arrivals had come in during the days before the coalition reached the facility.Among them: eleven who were lycan. Six who were huma

They were expected.The ladder was down. Not as an oversight — deliberately. The kind of deliberateness that communicates: we know you're here, we have decided to let you come. The gangway was lit from above with a single, cool light that illuminated the hull and the water around it without illuminating anything beyond.Elias went up first.The deck was open and empty. The vessel's superstructure loomed ahead — bridge, research decks, below that the living quarters. Everything was running on minimal systems. The hum of the ship's generators was a low, constant presence beneath everything.A door at the superstructure's base stood open.He walked through it.They were in the main research salon — a large, low-ceilinged space that had been stripped of its laboratory equipment and furnished instead with a circular table and six chairs. All six were occupied.The council.Five appeared to be in their sixties or seventies in the human reckoning — the particular, well-preserved age of lycan

The sun came up over the sea in a long, flat band of light that turned the water gold.Elias was on the research vessel's forward deck, sitting with his back against the superstructure, his knees drawn up, his hand pressed against the ribs that were telling him with considerable insistence that they had opinions about the previous night's events.One fractured. The other two bruised. He could feel the healing starting — the slow, warm progression of his body doing what his body did — but it was going to take a day, and in the meantime the rib had comments about breathing.He breathed anyway.The sea was extraordinary. He had not been on open water before, had grown up in a landlocked forest community where water meant streams and mountain lakes, and the scale of the ocean was genuinely new — not the scale as an abstraction but as a physical, sensory reality. The light on it. The smell of it. The particular emptiness of the horizon, which went further than the eye expected and created

The coalition spent four days on the coast.Not resting — there was no resting, exactly, not with two network sites still dark and the transmission's reverberations still moving through pack territories and human communities and the complex, unpredictable aftermath of a secret sixty years in the making being exposed to several thousand people simultaneously.But the four days had a different quality from the weeks before them. The siege had lifted. The operational urgency that had driven everything since the valley was replaced by a different urgency — slower, more structural, the urgency of people who have broken something and are now looking at the pieces and beginning to understand what comes next.The formal accounting process was established on the second day. Seven pack representatives. Three hunter community elders, including Thomas. Two human civic figures who had arrived after the transmission with cautious, serious faces and a great many questions. Dr. Calla and Terran as te