"Same signature as the hub device?" I ask.
"Seraphina?" Julian says.
Seraphina's eyes are still closed. "It's Adrienne's work."
Dmitri's call comes in next. His voice is flat and clipped, consonants bitten off. "Forty percent of my reserves. Gone. The bags are intact. The seals are intact. The blood inside is black."
The minor lord who stayed after Nadia's terms comes through on Ethan's terminal. His voice shakes. He asks the same questions Okonkwo already asked.
Three allied territories. Hit at the same time. Clean supply turned to poison without a single bag being opened, without a single guard seeing anything, without a single alarm going off.
Ethan looks up from the terminal. "Incoming from Charleston. Vivienne's people."
The room goes still.
"Put them through," I say.
The voice on the line isn't Vivienne's. One of her staff, clipped and professional and barely keeping it together. Their reserves have turned. Sealed bags, contaminated blood.
She didn't commit to Konstantin. She didn't commit to us. She chose neither, and he hit her anyway.
I look at the map on the screen. The route we traced last night, going nowhere now.
"He hit everyone at the same time," I say. "Every ally is dealing with their own crisis. Nobody can send help. Nobody can look at anything except what's in front of them." I turn from the screen. "And the one lord we were about to approach just called us because her reserves are poisoned. The Charleston plan is dead."
Julian sets the tablet down. "He isolated the entire coalition in one night."
Maximus is on his feet. His face has gone blank, stripped flat, jaw locked.
"Carson," Maximus says. "Get him running the prototype. Whatever contaminated supply we have on site, he starts now."
"And when every territory wants him running theirs?" Julian says.
"Then we scale," I say. "Sullivan sources materials for a second machine. Carson builds it while the first one runs."
"Get the lords on a secure channel," Maximus says to Ethan. "Damage assessments from all four territories within the hour. Dmitri will lowball his numbers. Tell him I said don't."
Ethan's mouth twitches. He turns to his terminal.
The calls keep coming. The damage reports stacking. I stand at the head of the table and take each one and file it and givethe next order, and somewhere in the middle the shock burns off and leaves something colder in its place. Good. Cold works.
"Tell Carson I want a timeline on scaling," I say. "And tell him if he needs Elena tonight, she's his."
Julian nods.
The Charleston plan sits on the screen behind me, dead before we could launch it.
He wasn't ahead of you. He was around you. Every direction at once.
The floor moves.
Not a sound first. A feeling. Something shifts beneath my boots like the building just flinched. The vibration climbs through the soles of my feet, up through my shins, into my teeth. The table hums under my palms. The water in Ethan's glass shivers and rings against the rim.
Then the sound catches up. Low. Deep. A groan that comes from inside the walls, from the bones of the building, from the wards themselves bending under pressure I can feel in my chest, in the crescent mark.
The lights dim. Recover. Dim again.
Seraphina is already on her feet, already moving toward the garden where the wards are anchored.
