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PLANETARY LEASH VECTOR AUTHORIZED.

Kesta read it twice.

“What is the leash vector?” Lina asked.

Elara’s expression changed. “The thing they built the pair program to avoid using.” The orbital platforms emitted a low-frequency pulse. Every altered prisoner in the room reacted.

Keth dropped to one knee. Sera’s claws tore through the motor casing. Three Hallow survivors screamed as old implants activated along their spines. Dreven arched on the stretcher, horns scraping stone, his tail striking hard enough to crack a storage crate. Kesta reached for him and stopped before touching. His eyes found hers through pain.

“Permission,” he forced out.

“Yes.”

She pressed both hands to his chest and counted his breaths. The response between them flared—heat, awareness, a pull so strong it made the chamber tilt—but without the claim band there was no command inside it. No invisible pressure telling her what the sensation meant. Only Dreven, hurting. Only her, choosing to remain. The pulse ended. Across camp, people collapsed. Some rose confused. Others rose violent. Pela stared at the readings. “They can trigger every surviving implant at once.”

“And direct aggression,” Kesta said.

Elara nodded. “Toward command centers, mates, children—whatever produces the most useful data.” Dreven’s hand closed around Kesta’s wrist, not restraining. Anchoring.

“They will turn the camps against one another,” he said.

Rath answered from the doorway. “Then we stop being separate camps.” No one laughed at the impossibility. A second targeting point appeared over Ash Camp’s nursery. Kesta looked at the evidence on the wall, the children beneath it, and the wounded warlord who had released every right the planet said he possessed.

“We cannot survive six platforms by hiding,” she said.

Dreven sat up, pale and shaking. “Then we make the planet impossible to study.”

“How?”

He looked toward the old condenser network beneath the camp.

“By giving it one response they did not design.”

The camp did not have enough deep shelters for everyone. That fact turned planning into politics within minutes. Ash Camp families expected priority because the tunnels belonged to them. Hallow survivors had nowhere else to go. Red Basin fighters demanded space for the wounded they had taken defending the condenser route. Smaller settlements arriving under sanctuary law carried children no ledger had anticipated. Lina refused private allocations.

She ordered every shelter capacity written in the market and every placement decision spoken over the public channel. Sera ranked patients by survival need. Jessa mapped surface escape routes. Keth assigned guards who answered to the council rather than to family heads. Rath watched the process with open disbelief. “You are recording arguments while weapons charge.”

“We are recording who gets buried if the weapons fire,” Lina said. “That is exactly when power prefers darkness.”

The first allocation failed when one clan refused to share a vent chamber with Hallow prisoners whose implants had activated. Nara stepped forward before Kesta could intervene.

“My children will take the surface trench,” she said. “Then no one has to fear them.”

The shame that followed belonged to the entire market. Sera slammed a medical crate onto the council table. “The children go below. Adults capable of movement rotate through the trench. Anyone who believes a terrified child is the primary threat may volunteer for the first surface watch.” No one did. The revised allocation passed. Pela intercepted a narrow-band transmission during the debate. The source was not orbit. It came from a descending observer carrier.

A human face appeared for half a second before encryption returned: Doctor Cale, older than Kesta remembered, wearing the same calm expression he had worn while signing deaths that had not happened. He was watching the shelter dispute.

“He wants us clustered,” Elara said.

“He wants us to choose badly,” Kesta answered. “Then he calls the result evidence.”

Cale’s voice entered the channel, smooth and almost kind.

“Doctor Frank. Your presence has destabilized a protected research population. Stand down and medical evacuation will be extended to all compliant human subjects.”

Around Kesta, people reacted to the word human. Some with hope. Others with old hatred.

“What about nonhuman prisoners?” she asked.