I found the rest of it the following day.
The oldest living member of the original network architects was a woman named Edra. Ninety-one years old. She had lived in Clearwater Pack for sixty years under a name that was not her original one, the eldest surviving member of a family that had decided, four generations ago, that governance through bond coercion was more stable than governance through consent.
She had placed the first bond in what would eventually become the network. She had built the architecture Crane studied and imitated decades later, copying a system he had not invented but had simply found and refined. She had been managing the network from inside Clearwater for six decades, using Gerald, using Leon, using the pack's rigid social structure as cover the entire time.
She
