Chapter 72: Chapter 72

Derek's POV

Davina didn't say anything until we were back in our room.

Then she sat on the edge of the bed, looked at me with the expression she reserved for moments when she was deciding between honesty and diplomacy, and chose honesty the way she always did.

"You lied to the council."

"I withheld information."

"Derek."

"There's a difference."

"There really isn't." She folded her hands in her lap. "Forrest noticed. I watched his face when you answered that question. He's been a government liaison for eleven years. He knows what a careful non-answer sounds like."

I sat down in the chair across from her. The room was quiet. Down the hall Aria was sleeping and Mara had retired to her quarters and the compound had finally settled into something resembling peace.

"If I tell them," I said, "we cannot untell them. That's not a door we can close again."

"I know that."

"Governments will demand testing. They'll want to know which humans are closest to awakening. They'll want programs and protocols and controlled environments. They'll take something that should be organic and they'll try to put it in a box."

"Maybe," Davina said. "Or maybe humans are capable of handling information about themselves better than you're giving them credit for."

"The Void was capable of existing freely before someone decided it was too dangerous and imprisoned it for eternity. Good intentions are not a protection against catastrophic outcomes."

She was quiet for a moment.

"So your plan is to carry this alone indefinitely."

"My plan is to understand it better before I hand it to people who have the power to weaponize it."

"And who decides when you understand it well enough?"

I didn't answer.

"You." She leaned forward slightly. "You decide. Alone. Without oversight. Without input from the people most affected by the decision."

"Davina."

"I'm not attacking you. I'm describing what you just told me you're going to do." Her voice was steady and direct. No anger in it. Just the particular precision she used when she wanted me to hear something clearly. "You came back from The Void transformed. You're carrying knowledge that changes everything. And your first instinct is to manage it. To control who knows what and when."

"My first instinct is to protect people."

"Those two things are not the same."

I stood up. I moved to the window and stood there with my back to her, looking at nothing.

"I felt what happens when beings are kept in the dark," I said quietly. "I carried three thousand years of what that costs. I know that better than anyone in this world right now."

"Then act like it."

I turned around.

She met my eyes without flinching.

"Humans have been walking around their entire lives with something locked inside them," she said. "Something that belongs to them. That was put there without their consent and suppressed without their knowledge. You want to keep that from them because you're afraid of how they'll react. But Derek, the fear of their reaction is not yours to carry. It's theirs."

I stayed where I was.

"What if the reaction breaks the peace?" I said.

"What if it does?" She stood up. "The peace was built on an incomplete truth. Maybe what it needs to survive is the rest of it."

We stood on opposite sides of the room for a long moment.

Neither of us moved.

"I need more time," I said finally.

"Time is not something the universe tends to hold still for."

She was right. She was almost always right and it was one of the things I loved about her and also one of the things that made moments like this one so uncomfortable.

"One week," I said. "Give me one week to think through how to present this responsibly."

She considered that.

"One week," she agreed. "And then we decide together. Not you alone. Together."

I nodded.

It wasn't enough time. I already knew it wasn't enough time. But it was what I had asked for and she had given it and I was going to use every hour of it.

I got three days.

Forrest came to me on the morning of the third day with a tablet in his hand and an expression that told me before he spoke that something had already moved beyond my control.

"You need to see this," he said.

The press conference had happened six hours earlier. A scientist named Dr. Elena Martinez, a geneticist at a research institute in Stockholm, had called every major news outlet and stood in front of a room of cameras and journalists and presented eighteen months of research.

I watched the recording with Forrest standing beside me.

Dr. Martinez was in her early forties with dark hair pulled back and the particular calm of someone who had rehearsed what she was about to say hundreds of times and still wasn't entirely sure the world was ready for it.

She presented her data cleanly. Sequences in human DNA that had no known function. Sequences that appeared across every human population on earth regardless of ethnicity or geography. Sequences that, when compared to the published supernatural genetics research released as part of the peace accords, showed structural similarities that could not be explained by coincidence.

She called them dormant markers.

She said they looked like a switch in the off position.

She said she did not know what would happen if they were switched on.

The questions from the journalists were immediate and loud and she answered each one with the same careful precision.

When the recording ended I set the tablet down on the table.

"It went everywhere," Forrest said. "Every platform. Every news network. It's been running for six hours and it's accelerating."

"Where is she now?"

"Still in Stockholm. She's been in interviews since the press conference ended. She's not backing down."

"No." I looked at the frozen image on the tablet. Dr. Martinez at the podium with her data projected behind her. "She wouldn't be."

My phone began to vibrate. Then Forrest's. Then the compound's internal communication system activated with three alerts in quick succession.

Davina appeared in the doorway.

She looked at my face. Then at the tablet on the table. Then back at my face.

"What happened?"

"Someone found it," I said. "Independently. A geneticist in Sweden."

Her expression moved through several things quickly.

"It's public?"

"Six hours ago."

She closed her eyes for exactly two seconds. Then opened them.

"Okay," she said. "Then we get ahead of it."

Outside the compound walls, I could already feel the shift. Not supernaturally. Just the way you can feel a storm changing the pressure of the air before a single drop of rain falls.

My phone showed forty-seven missed calls.

Forrest's government contact was already sending emergency requests for a statement from the supernatural council.

Three pack Alphas were calling simultaneously.

And somewhere in Stockholm, Dr. Elena Martinez was sitting in front of another camera, explaining to the world that the line between human and supernatural might not be a line at all.

I picked up my phone.

Davina stood beside me and did not say I told you.

She didn't have to.

The week I had asked for was gone. The careful plan I had wanted to build was gone. The controlled, responsible, measured approach I had convinced myself was wisdom was gone.

What was left was the world as it actually was.

Awake. Afraid. Demanding answers.

And us, standing at the center of it, holding information we could no longer choose to keep.