Leon laid it out for them in the resonance room. All of it.
Syl's seed. The wild carriers in Maren's clinic. The forced injections as deliberate seedings. Irsa manufacturing carriers from street-level subjects who hadn't consented and couldn't survive the process without support they weren't getting.
He told Serath, Ren, Asha, and Marek — all five of them in the same room for the first time. The space felt different with this many people in it. Smaller, denser, the ambient source frequency refracted through five carriers and one non-carrier who happened to be the most perceptive person in the group.
Ren sat against the wall with his arms crossed, listening with the focused stillness that meant he was already three moves ahead of the conversation.
Serath stood near the center with her hands behind her back. Her silver eyes tracked Leon's words the way they tracked energy signatures — cataloguing, weighing, filing.
Asha was on the floor with her knees drawn up. She'd heard most of this in Greyward. Her bruises had faded to yellow. Her expression hadn't changed.
Marek leaned against the opposite wall from Ren, his posture deliberate — occupying the space with the awareness of someone still learning the room's dynamics, still calculating where he fit in a group he hadn't been part of a week ago.
Leon finished talking. The room was quiet.
Serath spoke first. "How many artificial carriers?"
"Syl found seven. Three in Maren's clinic. Asha reported six in Irsa's safe houses. If the refinery operation was running test subjects SR-4 through SR-11, that's eight. The overlap between these groups is unknown."
"Conservative estimate?"
"Fifteen to twenty. Maybe more."
The number sat in the room. Fifteen to twenty people carrying forced seeds, untrained and unsupported, most of them destabilizing. Added to the five known natural carriers in the Academy — six counting Voss — and however many unidentified naturals the source's expansion was drawing in.
The carrier population had gone from rare anomaly to active crisis in a matter of weeks.
"They need integration support," Serath said. "Without it, their seeds will overrun their Origin Force. Core collapse within months. Weeks, for the weakest."
"We can barely manage our own integration," Ren said. Not dismissive — factual. "Leon's threshold is at fourteen minutes. Marek's had one session. Jorin's still in basic suppression. We don't have the capacity to train twenty wild carriers while preparing for the convergence approach."
"We don't have the capacity to let them die, either."
"I'm not suggesting we let them die. I'm suggesting we acknowledge the constraint." Ren's ember eyes moved to Leon. "You're the decision point. You're the one with the convergence timeline. Every hour you spend in Greyward stabilizing wild carriers is an hour you're not in the chamber building threshold."
"I know that."
"Do you? Because the look on your face when you talked about Syl says you've already decided."
Leon's jaw tightened. Ren was reading him the way he always did — accurately, uncomfortably, with the specific precision of someone who'd watched him make decisions for weeks and could predict the shape of the next one before Leon had finished forming it.
"I haven't decided anything."
"You've decided you're going back. The question is what you're bringing with you."
Marek spoke. "Jorin."
Everyone looked at him.
"You need carriers in Greyward who can stabilize the artificial seeds. You can't go yourself — the convergence training is too critical, and you need both arms at full capacity before the approach." He said it with the measured delivery of someone presenting a brief, no emotion, all architecture. "Jorin's suppression is stable. His seed responds well to guided contact — you proved that in the chamber. And he's early-stage enough that working with weak, damaged carriers won't overwhelm his own system."
"He's your little brother," Leon said.
"He's also a carrier who needs practical experience with his own seed before the source gets any louder." Marek's expression was controlled, but his hands had moved — right hand gripping left wrist, the unconscious posture of someone holding down something they didn't want to show. "I'm not volunteering him as a sacrifice. I'm volunteering him as a medic. He's steadier than any of us right now precisely because he's new. No integration trauma. No fused arms. No history with the source pulling him through a floor."
"That's a risk assessment," Serath said. "Not an endorsement."
"It's both."
"And if one of the artificial carriers destabilizes while Jorin is in contact? If a forced seed reacts to his natural seed with the same aggression Leon's showed toward mine?"
"Then Asha goes with him." Marek looked at the Oni. "You've been to the safe houses. You know the terrain. And you can handle a destabilizing carrier without losing your own stability."
Asha didn't react for a long moment. Her amber eyes rested on Marek with the evaluative weight of someone being asked to protect a person by someone who'd been her political enemy two weeks ago.
"Your brother," she said. "Under my watch."
"Yes."
"If something goes wrong, I prioritize his safety over theirs."
"That's what I'm asking."
"Then fine."
The agreement settled into the room. Not comfortably — the edges were rough, with Ren's concern about Leon's focus, Serath's worry about seed interactions, and Marek's carefully managed fear for Jorin. But the structure held. A plan that wasn't quite a plan. Triage that wasn't enough.
Jorin and Asha in Greyward, stabilizing artificial carriers. Leon and Serath in the chamber, building toward the convergence point. Ren and Marek at the Academy, managing the institutional landscape — Drennis's surveillance, the Office's deferred review, the political architecture that kept them all enrolled and breathing.
Kira trained outside the carrier network, growing stronger by the day, unaware of most of what was happening beneath the building she lived in. Leon owed her a conversation about that. He added it to the list of things he owed people and couldn't afford to pay.
"One more thing," Leon said. "The artificial carriers — the ones Syl found, the ones in Irsa's network. If they're broadcasting seed frequencies uncontrolled in Greyward, the Office's sensor grid will eventually register the signatures. Wild carrier output at that density, in a concentrated area — it'll look like a Remnant-class event. Drennis will investigate. Or someone worse will."
"How long before the sensors pick it up?" Ren asked.
"Depends on the output level. If the carriers are stabilized — suppressed, controlled — maybe never. If they keep broadcasting wild—" Leon shrugged. The gesture felt inadequate for the weight behind it. "Weeks. Maybe less."
Another clock. Another deadline. Added to the convergence timeline, the deferral expiration, the right arm's unpredictable reconstruction, and the source's patient expansion beneath the Academy.
Too many clocks. Not enough time on any of them.
That night's chamber session was supposed to be routine.
Dual-flow exercise. Serath's Origin Force in Leon's left arm. Target: sixteen minutes — two above last session's threshold. Steady, incremental progress. The kind that built calluses and hardened channel walls and didn't make anyone's arm glow or transmit blueprints to nearby carriers.
They started well. Eight minutes of clean dual flow — the seed tolerating Serath's current with only the familiar flinch at the eight-minute mark, the territorial tension that had become manageable through repetition. The friction generated heat. The heat stressed the walls. The walls adapted. Progression.
At twelve minutes, Leon's right arm twitched.
Not the slow, voluntary flexion of the morning. A sharp, full-arm spasm — shoulder to fingertip — that pulled the dead arm against the sling strap and produced an audible pop from his elbow joint.
Serath's cycling stuttered. "Was that—"
"The arm. Ignore it. Keep pushing."
She resumed. Thirteen minutes. The dual flow held. Leon's left arm burned with the deep, grinding ache of growth. His right arm settled back to its resting warmth.
Fourteen minutes — the target threshold from last session. Matching, not exceeding. Leon pushed harder. Opened his left-arm channels a fraction wider, let Serath's Origin Force penetrate deeper, accepted more friction for more adaptation.
Fifteen minutes. New territory. The seed trembled but held. Sweat ran from Leon's temple to his jaw. His fingers tingled. His forearm burned. But the channels were holding, the walls were holding, the calluses forming in real time with each second of sustained load adding microscopic reinforcement that would make the next session easier.
Fifteen-thirty.
The right arm detonated.
Not metaphor. Not spasm. A full discharge — unnamed energy erupting from Leon's right side in a wave that had nothing to do with his left-arm exercise and everything to do with the autonomous reconstruction reaching a tipping point. The softened fusion layers in his right forearm gave way — not all of them, not completely, but enough. Three channels opened simultaneously, the compressed architecture beneath the fusion expanding like springs released from a box, and the seed's energy poured through them with the indiscriminate force of water through a broken dam.
Leon screamed. Couldn't help it — the sensation was too extreme for silence. Three dead channels suddenly alive, conducting energy they hadn't held in weeks, the nerve endings inside them firing all at once in a cascade that was equally pain and presence.
His right hand blazed with the nameless color. The chamber's mercury-veins flared in response. The source pulsed hard and deep, the vast body beneath them reacting to the sudden signal from a carrier whose arm had just partially resurrected inside its chamber.
Serath yanked her energy from his left arm and dropped to her knees beside him. Her hands on his shoulders — the same position from the source-contact incident, the anchor point. "Leon — your arm—"
He couldn't answer. The three opened channels were conducting wildly, energy surging in random directions with no routing and no control, the seed pouring through pathways that didn't remember how to organize traffic. His right hand clenched and opened in rapid succession. The glow brightened, dimmed, and brightened again.
His left arm went numb. The seed, split between the new right-arm channels and the left-arm architecture, couldn't sustain both. The same failure mode from the relay session — except this time the split wasn't voluntary. The right arm had taken the energy. Seized it. Three starving channels drinking everything they could reach.
"The left arm is draining," Serath said, urgent. Her diagnostic touch on his left wrist. "The seed is redistributing. If it empties the left channels completely—"
The left arm would fuse. The same process. The same catastrophe. Except this time there'd be no arm left to rebuild.
Leon grabbed the seed. Not gently, not with the careful consensual communication he'd built over weeks, but with desperation. Raw, screaming, physical will directed inward like a hand closing around a throat.
STOP. RIGHT ARM OFF. LEFT ARM STAYS. NOW.
The seed thrashed, pulled in two directions — the new channels demanding energy, the old channels demanding survival. The right arm's hunger was primal and cellular, the need of tissue that had been starved for weeks suddenly given access to the thing it craved.
Leon held. His vision greyed at the edges. His jaw was clamped shut hard enough to creak. Every conscious thought he had was compressed into a single command: left arm stays alive.
Three seconds. Five. Seven.
The seed chose.
The right arm's glow died. The three opened channels went quiet — not fused again, but dormant. Shut down. The seed pulled everything back to the left side, flooding the depleted channels with energy that felt hot and ragged and barely sufficient.
Leon collapsed sideways. Serath caught him. His left hand was shaking so badly he couldn't make a fist. His right arm hung limp — not dead, not the familiar sealed silence. Something between. Three channels open but empty, waiting, like mouths that had tasted food and been told to close.
"Sixteen minutes," Serath said. Her voice was wrecked — not clinical, not precise, but the voice of someone who'd just watched a person nearly lose both arms in the same room where they'd been methodically training to save one. "You held sixteen minutes before the right arm discharged."
"Progress," Leon managed. His voice was a whisper.
"Don't joke."
"I'm not."
He lay on the chamber floor. Serath's hand on his shoulder. His left arm tingling as sensation returned. His right arm warm and strange and different — three channels open that hadn't been open an hour ago, the reconstruction leaping forward in a single violent event instead of the gradual thaw he'd expected.
The arm wasn't dead anymore. It was starving. And a starving arm inside a body with limited energy was a competitor, not a partner.
The seed huddled in his core. Exhausted. Frightened by Leon's forceful command — the first time he'd grabbed it like that since the old suppression days. A crack in the trust they'd built. Small. Present.
Leon felt it.
Reached inward. Not with force. With the other thing.
Sorry.
The seed trembled. Didn't respond.
He lay there. The chamber pulsed beneath him. The source had felt the discharge — had responded with interest and attention, with the patient gravity of something that recognized its own fragments struggling to survive inside bodies too small to hold them.
His right hand twitched on the stone. Three channels, open and empty, waiting to be fed.
The arm was coming back.
And it was going to be hungry.