An hour before dawn on Day 44, the cold air in the Saltglass notch was still as glass.
Kezra Venn walked the northern outer edge of Site Thirteen, her boots crunching softly on the crushed limestone ballast. Beside her, Fellis Dain carried the shuttered horn lantern low against the gravel, its narrow amber beam lighting up the white chalk line that marked the sixty-four-pace boundary.
Every twelve paces, Kezra knelt to verify the tension of the outer warning lines and check the anchor pegs driven into the limestone paving.
Her mind was running with the cool, cold and exact focus of an artisan about to execute a master firing. Behind her ribs, the fourteen completed circuits hummed in quiet harmony with the mountain’s bones. The five active addresses—the threshold in Kilnstep, the two limeworks plots, and the paired Reach parcels of Saltglass—sat steady and silent in her awareness.
They reached the northwest corner anchor. Then, thirty paces back from the cliff edge, the beam of Fellis’s lantern glinted off a rod of polished metal standing upright in the shadow of a limestone milestone.
Fellis stopped in his tracks, lowering the lantern. “Kezra. Look at the milestone.”
Kezra knelt in the gravel, her breath catching in her throat.
