Chapter 76: Chapter 76

Davina's POV

Mara's call came at 4:47 in the morning.

I was already awake. I had been awake for two hours running overnight reports from the regional teams and telling myself the unease sitting in my chest was exhaustion and not the thing it actually was. When my phone lit up with her name I knew before I answered. The way you know certain things. The way your body understands what your mind is still negotiating.

"She collapsed," Mara said. No preamble. No softening. "She's breathing. Her vitals are stable. But she won't wake up."

I was dressed and moving before the call ended.

Derek met me in the hallway. He had heard it in my voice through the walls. We didn't speak on the way to the car. There was nothing useful to say yet and we both understood that.

The medical team in Riga had done everything they could. When we arrived she was in a clean room in the facility the council had set up as a regional support hub. She was lying on her back with monitoring equipment tracking everything measurable. Her chest rose and fell. Her heart beat with a steadiness that felt almost insulting given everything else that was wrong.

Her eyes were open.

That was the part that undid me.

They were open and completely still. Not fixed on any point in the room. Not moving. Just open, like a door left that way by someone who had stepped out for a moment and not yet returned.

I sat beside her and took her hand and felt nothing press back.

"Her consciousness is distributed," Mara said from behind me. Her voice was careful and exhausted. "When she opened the corridor for the eleven in Riga it collapsed the boundary she'd been maintaining between each connection. Every merger she's ever facilitated is still open. She's in all of them simultaneously."

"Pull her back," Derek said.

"I don't know how. Her ability works from the inside. There's no external mechanism for retrieval. She has to find her own way back and right now she can't locate herself within the network well enough to navigate."

"So she's lost," I said.

"She's scattered," Mara said. "It's different."

It didn't feel different.

I sat with her hand in both of mine and watched her open eyes and did the thing I had done every time the world had taken something from me that I couldn't get back through force. I got quiet. I got very quiet inside and I looked at what was actually in front of me without flinching away from it.

My daughter was dying.

Not quickly. Not violently. But the human body was not designed to exist as a vessel for a consciousness that had spread itself across forty-seven minds. It would sustain her for a while. Days. Maybe longer if we were careful. But consciousness and body needed each other to maintain integrity and every hour they stayed separated was an hour of damage accumulating in directions medicine couldn't track.

Derek spoke to the medical team. He spoke to Sable, who had arrived by morning. He made calls and issued directives and did the things that needed doing while I sat with Aria and thought.

I was still thinking at noon when Forrest appeared in the doorway with a look on his face that I had learned to translate accurately in the past three weeks.

"Tell me," I said.

"The Pure released a statement an hour ago. They're claiming responsibility for what happened to Aria. Not the Riga merger specifically. Something broader." He paused. "They claim they've been using her mergers to build something."

I stood up slowly.

"What kind of something?"

"A network. Every consciousness she touched, they've had access to. They call it the Aria Protocol. They've been embedding ideological architecture inside each merger connection. Every person she's ever helped is now carrying Pure ideology inside the network they share with her." He held out his tablet. "They've been using her as a vector, Davina. She thought she was healing the divide. They were using that to spread their belief system through the connections she created."

I read the statement twice.

The language was precise and deliberate and designed to be maximally devastating. They weren't just claiming they had corrupted her work. They were claiming they owned the network she had built. Every link. Every bridge. Every corridor she had opened between frightened humans and the supernatural beings who had helped them.

All of it theirs now.

I gave the tablet back to Forrest.

"Where's Derek?" I said.

"War room."

"Tell him I need twenty minutes before he does anything."

Forrest looked uncertain. "Davina—"

"Twenty minutes, Forrest."

He left.

I sat back down beside Aria. Looked at her open eyes. At the monitoring screens. At her hand lying still inside mine.

Then I took out my phone and made a call I had not told anyone I was planning to make.

The Pure's public communications line was available. Part of their deliberate positioning as a legitimate movement rather than a terrorist organization. I had the number because Forrest had shared it two weeks ago for a different reason entirely and I had kept it without knowing why.

I knew why now.

The person who answered was professional. Controlled. They took my name and put me on hold for less than a minute.

The voice that came on was male. Calm in the way that practiced people are calm. Not naturally. Deliberately.

"Alpha Davina," he said. "I wondered when you'd call."

"I want to negotiate."

"I'm sure you do."

"My daughter is not a weapon. Whatever you've built inside her network, you're going to help me dismantle it."

"In exchange for?"

I had thought about this carefully for twenty minutes. I had turned it over and looked at its edges and asked myself if there was another way and concluded that there wasn't. Not one that moved fast enough.

"Aria's mission stops," I said. "Immediately and permanently. No more mergers. No more global facilitation. She retires from public work entirely and you get nothing further from her network."

A pause.

"That's a meaningful offer," the voice said.

"I know it is."

"It's not enough."

"Then tell me what is."

Another pause. Longer.

"We'll be in touch," he said.

The call ended.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment. Then I put it in my pocket and walked to the war room.

Derek was standing at the central screen with Sable and two senior pack Alphas. He looked at me when I entered. Read something in my face.

"What did you do?" he said quietly.

"I called The Pure."

The room got very still.

"Davina."

"They were going to use her regardless. At least this way we have a line of communication."

"They're not going to negotiate in good faith. They never—"

"Derek." I held up one hand. "I know that. But we needed them talking and now they're talking. And while they're talking to me, you need to find out where they're running the Aria Protocol from. Because her consciousness isn't just scattered. If they have access to the network, they have an anchor point. Somewhere physical where they're processing the connections."

He stared at me.

"If we find the source," I said, "we can find Aria."

He turned to the screens.

I went back to sit with my daughter.

Her hand was still. Her eyes were still open.

Somewhere inside the network she had built to save the world, she was alive and lost and being used by the people who had let her save them.

I pressed her hand between both of mine.

"We're coming," I said quietly.

Outside the window, the sky over Riga was the particular gray of a day that hadn't decided yet what it was going to become.

I knew how it felt.