Semua Bab The Wolfless Doctor: Bab 151 - Bab 160

On the fifth week of Lydia's operation, her check-in message was longer than usual.It contained two pieces of information that I took immediately to Reston and then to the Council.First, she had reached the inner organizational layer of the Bloodless through a regional community in Slovakia, and Nadia Voss was more accessible than their security suggested. She moved through communities personally, not just directing from a distance, and appeared to feel genuinely safe within her network.Second, and more urgently, the Unminding research had reached a stage that Voss's researchers were describing internally as the calibration phase. Lydia did not have technical details, but calibration phase, based on her understanding of how Covenant researchers had described similar stages, suggested they were not theorizing anymore.They were testing.The Council met within hours of the report."How long does calibration typically take?" Victoria asked, looking at Serena."In my experience with an

Mary sat with that for a moment, her hands wrapped around her coffee cup, her expression doing the thing it did when she was moving through implications quickly without showing the effort."How long before she figures it out?" she asked."I cannot know for certain. But Nadia Voss is not a researcher who makes the same mistake indefinitely. She will identify the pattern in her failures eventually. Weeks, most likely. Perhaps less.""Then we need Lydia to get us information before that window closes," Mary said. "Specifically whether Voss already knows about the active channeling requirement or whether she is still working from the assumption that a stored sample functions.""If she does not know yet, we have more time than we think," I said. "If she already knows, the threat escalates immediately.""Reston needs to see this today," Mary said, standing."I am going to him now," Serena said, gathering her documents. "I wanted you to hear it from me first."She left, and Mary and I looked

Reston ran the extraction the way he ran everything, precisely and without visible stress, though I had learned that his stillness was a working state rather than an absence of intensity. He had three teams positioned across two countries for the seven-day window, with redundant routes planned for four different scenarios depending on how the Bloodless community's behavior had shifted by the time Lydia needed to move.I was not present for the operation itself. That had been a condition of the Council's approval and honestly also a condition of my own better judgment. Lyanna was four months old, I was still at reduced capacity, and inserting myself into an extraction in Eastern Europe would have been the kind of decision my pre-motherhood self might have made and my current self recognized as reckless.I stayed at coalition headquarters and monitored through secure comms.The first six days were quiet on Lydia's end. She checked in briefly each morning, brief enough that the check-ins

Wednesday arrived with the particular quality of days that have been anticipated long enough that the arrival feels both sudden and overdue. I spent the morning at the healing center, partly because I had patients who needed me and partly because the work centered me in a way that nothing else quite replicated. Treating a young wolf's infected wound, helping an older witch manage the gradual fading of her abilities with age, these things reminded me of what I was actually fighting for in a way that strategy sessions in coalition rooms sometimes lost.At eleven-thirty I went home, changed into something that was neither formal nor deliberately casual, and sat down at the desk in the study with Owen standing slightly behind and to my left where he would be visible but not positioned as though he was the person in charge of the conversation.Halvorsen's channel connected at exactly noon.Nadia Voss looked like her photograph but also significantly different in the way that photographs al

Voss looked at the screen when Lydia appeared, and I watched her process who she was looking at."Lydia Morrison," she said."Yes," Lydia said."You were inside one of our communities for six weeks.""Yes."A pause. "Why are you talking to me now? You got what you came for.""Because I spent six weeks inside your community and I saw what you are building and I understand why people are drawn to it," Lydia said. Her voice was steady. "And I also know, from my own experience, what it feels like to be so certain that your method is the only sufficient response to a genuine wrong that you stop being able to see the people it will harm." She looked directly at Voss. "I extracted forty percent of the Healer Alpha's capacity because I believed bloodline power was the root of everything that had gone wrong. I was not wrong about the problem. I was catastrophically wrong about the solution." A pause. "The people in your community deserve something real. What you are offering them will not be r