It happened in the study, the way most of their real disagreements did — not the kitchen, which had become, over the years, neutral ground, but the study, where the work lived, where the stakes of any disagreement carried the weight of the territory itself.
"I want to send a team," Darius said. "Now. Not waiting for Iris and Zane to finish mapping the full extent of it. We know enough — four territories, an active suppression network larger than anything we've encountered, Rowan's reach confirming the scale of it. Every month we wait is a month more people stay suppressed."
"And if we go in too early, with incomplete information, we risk exactly what happened with Riven," Sera said. "We move before we understand what we're moving into, and the compound — or whoever we send — ends up walk
