[Outside yard - hours earlier]
Stone is beside me before I've processed that he moved.
He reads the scene the way he reads everything — quickly, without drama. Jim and Dalton against the wall. The shaking. The tears. The yard gone silent.
He looks at me. "What's happening."
"I don't know," I say. "Not exactly."
He looks at them a moment longer. Unclips his radio. "Lumi. Red House common room." That's all. He clips it back. "Inside."
***
The common room settles around us. Jake against the far wall, arms crossed. Leo beside me, shoulder to shoulder, quiet for once. Jim and Dalton on the same couch — not by design, justwhere they landed, still close, still oriented toward each other like neither wants to lose what they just found.
Lumi arrives. She takes in the room, finds Stone, stands beside him. The room exhales. Nobody talks about it. It just happens.
She doesn't know Dalton. I watch her clock him — brief assessment, filed, moved on. She's here because Stone called her, because Stone knew the room needed steady and she's the steadiest thing he has. She's not here to explain anything. She's here to hold the space while it happens.
Dalton talks first.
His brother. David. Nine years ago — eighteen, student at Frosthaven Academy. Missing. No body. No trace. The kind of disappearance that doesn't close. Dalton left Luftis Academy in Europe and spent two years beating his head against the bureaucratic wall. Then he spent seven more years becoming someone who could get close to Frosthaven without anyone being suspicious of his motives.
Security consultant. Review panel recommendation. A cover story that was also true.
He says it flat. The way he says everything that costs him — like a report he's reading from, the emotion in the facts rather than in how he delivers them.
Jim is listening with his whole body.
"I don't remember before," Jim says, when Dalton stops. Quiet. Careful. "The feral — it takes the before. Names. Places. I don't know when it started. I don't know how long I was on the mountain." A pause. "I don't know what my name is."
Dalton looks at him.
"Was," Jim says. "What it was."
"David," Dalton says. Low. Like he's handing something over. "Your name is David. David Lane Dalton. You're twenty-seven years old. You grew up in—" His voice catches. He gets it back. "Burnaby. Mom and dad. A dog named Hopper. You called meBilly because you couldn't say William when you were two and it stuck."
Jim's eyes are wet.
He's not looking away.
"Bilbo," he says.
"You started that when you were eight," Dalton says. "You thought it was hilarious. You never stopped."
Jim makes a sound I've only heard from him once before — the sound of someone feeling something too big for the container. Not grief exactly. Something larger and stranger than grief. The years on the mountain and the years before the mountain and all the space between them suddenly having a shape he can touch.
"I dreamed about a dog," Jim says. "I didn't know what it meant."
Dalton closes his eyes.
"Hopper," he whispers.
Jake is very still at the wall. His jaw is tight and his eyes are wet and he's looking at the floor because this is Jake's version of falling apart — contained, private, as small as he can make it.
I look at Leo.
He's already looking at me. He reaches over and takes my hand without looking at it and holds on.
