The full Council assembled in three days.Adler arrived first, ahead of the others, alone, at seven in the morning with a travel case she set down in the main hall and did not open. She looked at the pack house with the eyes of a woman cataloguing what she saw against what she expected, and then she looked at Claire and said: "You found the mark.""Yes," Claire said."How long has it been there?""Eight months."Adler's face moved briefly, the way controlled faces moved when something landed harder than they anticipated. Then it was still again. "We need to talk before the others arrive," she said.They talked for two hours. Adler brought documentation — physical records, some of them older than the North Ridge archive's oldest files, brought from the Council's sealed vault that she had apparently opened for the first time in forty years that morning. She spread them on the kitchen table and walked Claire through them the way a general walked a junior officer through a map: here is wh
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