They gathered the next morning — not a formal session, just the people who'd built this work alongside Sera and Darius, assembled in the study with coffee and the specific gravity of a decision too large for two people to carry alone.
Cole laid out what he had first, the operational picture, dispassionate and complete: the four territories, the limited information Zane had managed to extract from the older archive references, the estimate — rough, acknowledged as rough — of how many carriers might be affected based on Rowan's brief, accidental reading of the corridor's scale.
"What's your assessment?" Darius asked him directly. "Not what either of us wants to hear. What you actually think."
Cole considered the question with his usual care.
"I think Sera's caution is operationally sound
