Mira watched me dress with an attention she pretended was casual, and the normalcy of it, the easy push and pull between us, felt more restorative than a week of running.
Back at camp, Lucian sat against his tree with his shirt open, the scar from the silver compound a raised line across his chest. Healed but permanent, a reminder carved into his skin. He looked better than he had in days. Color returned, posture straight, the king’s body finally catching up to his stubbornness.
Solomon sat across from him with maps spread between them, and Farmon occupied his usual spot by the fire, grinding medicine with his misaligned hands.
“Look who’s verbal again,” Solomon said without looking up.
“Don’t make a thing of it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Lucian assessed me with quiet attention. Whatever he saw in my face satisfied him enough to nod once and return to the maps.
Mira settled beside me on a fallen log, the tablet open on her lap. She’d been compiling hunter personnel files from the compound’s archive, flagging names of recruits whose records showed cracks. Doubters. Conflicted. The ones who might listen if given a reason.
I leaned over her shoulder to look. Not because I expected to contribute. Because sitting next to her was better than sitting anywhere else, and because the data on the screen was starting to itch at a part of my brain that didn’t usually get much exercise.
“What’s that column?” I pointed at a series of dates in the recruitment records.
“Enlistment dates. When each hunter officially joined the Order.”
“And these?” A parallel column in a different file, one of the research logs she’d pulled from the sublevel archives.
“Purifier trial dates. When they tested each batch of the serum on captured lycans.”
I looked at both columns. Then I pulled the tablet toward me and scrolled through the recruitment records, cross-referencing thedates against the Purifier timelines. Mira let me take it without protest.
The pattern crept. A trial date in March, a cluster of enlistments in May. Another trial in August, another recruitment wave in October. The gap was consistent. Six to eight weeks between a Purifier test and a spike in new hunters joining the Order.
“Percy?” Mira was watching me.
“When they test the serum, what happens to the lycans?”
“They go feral. Mindless. Violent. No higher brain function.”
“And then what? They keep them locked up?”
She hesitated. “The reports mention‘containment failures.’Subjects that escaped during testing. It’s listed as a security issue.”
“How many containment failures?”
She scrolled through the research logs. “A lot. Dozens across the last twenty years.”
“One every six to eight weeks?”
Silence followed. The sound of two people arriving at the same conclusion from different directions.
“They’re not containment failures,” I said. “They’re releases. The Order creates feral wolves from captured lycans and then lets them loose. The wolves attack civilians. Survivors join the Order because they think lycans are monsters.” I set the tablet down.“It’s a pipeline. They manufacture the threat, then recruit from the wreckage.”
Mira’s face went white.
“Percy.” Her voice was barely audible. “Wyatt’s parents.”
“What about them?”
“He joined the Order because his parents were killed by a rogue lycan. That’s his whole recruitment story. It’s why he’s there.” Her hand was on her stomach, pressing hard enough that her knuckles went pale. “The attack that killed his parents. The dates. The geography. They match.”
The weight of it settled between us.
