Diana sat down.

Aurelius cleared his throat, his amber eyes moving across the faces at the table with the ease of someone who had run a thousand meetings and found the ceremony of them useful.

"Well," he said, "since we are all here, we were just about to begin. The question of approach." He leaned back in his chair, the molten veins in the wall behind him pulsing slow and steady. "Let’s be direct about it. We are not going to the Valdris Expanse to negotiate with Kruel. We are going to stop him. Permanently. So the question is how."

Diana smiled.

It was a small smile and it didn’t reach her eyes and it was the kind of smile that sat on a face when the face had been waiting for permission to say something for a long time.

"I was hoping you’d say that," she said. Then she looked at the door. "Shade...Mask"

Nothing happened for a half second.

Then Shade materialized.

Not from a corner. Not from a shadow. Just from the air beside the far wall, his form resolving out of nothing the way Umbral Fangs resolved, dark scales catching the room’s warm light, pale amber eyes already open and fixed on Diana with the patient attention he gave her now that had previously been reserved only for Noah.

Lucas said, "Every single time."

Aurelius had pushed his chair back six inches without appearing to decide to do it. He looked at Shade, then at Noah, then at Shade again. "That," he said, "my friend, is quite unsettling."

Jayden said nothing.

He was looking at Shade with his hands flat on the table and the expression of someone doing rapid mental inventory. The last time he had seen one of Noah’s dragons in person was three years ago, the inter academy competition, the bomb the Purge had planted, Noah handling the situation in the way Noah handled things which was to say completely and without asking anyone’s permission. Since then it had all been streams. Nyx stepping through a red portal in a coastal settlement. Two Red Deaths over a harbor. The hatchlings dropping from storm clouds like living lightning bolts.

Streams didn’t prepare you for the actual presence of one in the same room.

Noah was grinning.

He hadn’t told anyone Shade was in the room. He hadn’t needed to say anything because he had known since they sat down, not through the bond exactly, more like the awareness that had been building in him since the class change, the draconic perception that read the air around him differently now. The room had four strong presences in it. Lucas, Jayden, Aurelius, and a fifth thing that was older than all of them and considerably less interested in the meeting agenda.

’How far,’ he thought, looking at Shade standing calmly beside Diana while Aurelius tried to slow his heart rate. ’Three years ago I was a first gen nobody at Academy 12 with a sealed ability and a dragon egg I didn’t know what to do with. Now I’m sitting in a war room on a ship the size of a city with a king and two of the strongest soldiers alive and a dragon that just appeared out of the air because a girl who spent a year in a coma told him to.’

He kept the grin off his face. Mostly.

"Okay," Lucas said, pulling himself back to the table. "We have limited time before someone acknowledges this is real and we have to deal with it." He looked at Diana. "You said you had an idea."

Diana pulled up the map display built into the table’s surface, the Valdris Expanse expanding across the projection until the blue planet sat at the center, rotating slowly.

"The problem with Kruel," she said, "isn’t that he’s strong."

Jayden looked at her. "He’s extraordinarily strong."

"Yes," Diana said. "But that’s not the problem. The problem is that he’s strong and he’s smart and he adapts." She looked at the planet. "Every time we’ve engaged him he has learned from it. The first fight, Lucas and Noah with Nyx nearly ended it and the only reason Kruel survived was Arthur’s people pulling him out. So Kruel learned that our dragons are a genuine threat and he adjusted." She paused. "The second time, he came back to our home, where we had every advantage, and he still killed over two million people. Because he had adjusted."

The room was quiet.

"So going in and hitting hard isn’t enough," she continued. "Because hitting hard is what we do. He knows what hitting hard looks like from us. He’s been hit hard. He survived it. He evolved from it." She looked around the table. "You don’t stop something like Kruel by being stronger than him in the moment. You stop him by making sure the moment he can’t recover from actually happens."

Jayden leaned forward slightly. "You’re saying we can’t just win the fight. We have to win it in a way that doesn’t give him time to adapt."

"Or space," Diana said. "Or anything to work with afterward."

"Like a bomb," Noah said.

Diana looked at him.

"A bomb doesn’t care how strong you are," Noah said. "It doesn’t adapt to you. You don’t negotiate with it. You either contain it before it goes off or you don’t." He looked at the planet on the display. ’That’s what she’s thinking,’ he thought. ’Kruel isn’t a soldier to be defeated in the field. He’s an event. You don’t defeat an event. You either prevent it or you survive it or you find a way to make sure it expends itself in a place and a way that you’ve prepared for.’

"Exactly," Diana said, and the way she said it had a quality to it like something finally being said out loud that had been building for two years. "He’s a bomb. And you don’t fight a bomb. You don’t go toe to toe with it and try to punch it into stopping. You contain it. You shape where the explosion goes. You make sure when it goes off the only thing in the blast radius is what you’ve chosen to put there."

Lucas was looking at the map. "Containment requires knowing the terrain. We don’t know the terrain."

"We know some things," Diana said. "The planet is populated. Four hundred million people across the surface. Urban concentrations near water sources, standard planetary development pattern. Kruel has been there for two years which means he’s established somewhere. He wouldn’t be in the open, he’d be somewhere he chose for reasons that make sense to him."

"High ground," Jayden said. "Visibility. Multiple approach vectors he can monitor."

"Or the opposite," Diana said. "Somewhere isolated. Somewhere the population can’t access him easily. He’s not hiding from them, he’s separate from them. There’s a difference."

Jayden frowned. "Why separate? If he’s been there two years and the population can’t stop him, why not just be wherever he wants to be?"

"Because he’s not done," Diana said simply. "Whatever he’s doing on that planet, it isn’t finished yet. He needs space to do it without interruption."

’She’s right,’ Noah thought. ’Kruel on Earth was active. Moving. Attacking. Measuring. He came to the eastern Cardinal with a purpose and he executed it and left. On this planet he’s been stationary for two years. That’s not Kruel resting. That’s Kruel preparing.’

"Which means," Noah said aloud, "when we show up, we’re interrupting something. We don’t know what." 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

"Which is the second problem," Diana said. "We don’t know what we’re walking into on the ground. Which brings me to the window issue."

Aurelius had been quiet, listening with the attention of someone who respected what they were hearing. "The Conclave," he said.

"The moment we enter that sector, we’re in their territory," Diana said. "And from what Aurelius’s people found, the Conclave views humans as essentially equivalent to Harbingers. We show up with a fleet and start a fight that reshapes the local geography and we’re going to have their response force arriving in our rear while we’re still dealing with Kruel in front of us."

"How long before they respond," Lucas said, looking at Aurelius.

"From the nearest Conclave patrol position to the Valdris Expanse," Aurelius said, "based on my fleet’s intelligence. Twelve hours. Maybe fourteen if we’re fortunate."

"So we have twelve hours from the moment anyone notices us," Jayden said. "Twelve hours to engage Kruel, contain him, and finish it before we have a second front opening behind us."

"Twelve hours against something we’ve never beaten in a straight fight," Lucas said.

The table was quiet for a moment.

"Which is why we can’t fight him straight," Diana said.

Lucas looked at her. "Then how."

"You don’t fight the bomb," Diana said. "You build the containment around it first. Before it knows you’re there." She pulled the map display wider, showing the planet’s surface topography as best as Mira’s scout data had captured it. "We come in quiet. Aurelius’s ghost ships for insertion. Small teams. No fleet presence until we need it." She pointed at the planetary surface. "We find where he is. We assess the terrain. We start moving the civilian population out of whatever radius we’re going to need."

"We can’t communicate with them," Jayden said. "No shared language. No established channel. They don’t know we’re coming and from their perspective we’re as alien as Kruel is."

"Which is why," Diana said, and here her voice changed slightly, the calm exterior doing the work it always did but the thing underneath it grinding a little louder, "the key to all of this isn’t Kruel."

She let that sit for a second.

"The key," she said, "is the governing body of that planet."

Jayden opened his mouth.

"They have one," Diana said, before he could ask. "Every population of four hundred million has one. A structure that has survived whatever Kruel has been doing for two years, which means either he hasn’t touched it or he’s used it somehow. Either way it exists."

"And if we can access it," Noah said slowly, following the shape of it, ’there it is,’ he thought, ’the whole plan in one sentence.’

"If we can access it," Diana said, "we can move people. We can establish a perimeter. We can tell them what’s coming and give them a chance to be somewhere else when it happens." She looked at the blue planet on the display, the slow rotation of it, the cloud formations visible even at this resolution. "Four hundred million people we can’t protect if we don’t have a way to talk to someone who can move them."

She looked around the table.

"To save this planet," she said, her voice completely level, her eyes completely cold, "we need to take it first."

Nobody said anything.

The planet rotated on the display.

Shade’s tail moved once across the floor, the only sound in the room.