The day before the ritual Marina did not go to the boundary stones.

She spent the morning with the extraction teams, running the operation timing until every wolf involved could reproduce it without the map. Entry points, sublevel navigation, cell locations, exit routes, fallback positions. She ran it twice with Ragnar's team and once with the smaller group that would handle the outer corridors while Ragnar went deep.

Ragnar ran his wolves like he had always run them, with the economic precision of an Alpha who had spent years making sure his people came back. He asked good questions. He integrated new information without resistance. He pushed back on two...