The morning of the forty-sixth day broke with a cold, pale glare that bleached the southern horizon into a seamless wall of white chalk.
Kezra Venn stood in the center of the cleared dark rock yard. The sixteen-pace Plot square she had surveyed on Day 38 (Circuit 11) while recovering her stolen notebook from Splitflint’s fences. The ground beneath her boots was a hard, dark fiery stone floor, swept clear of loose gravel and surrounded by the low limestone curbs of Joric Thane’s backup wagon park.
Across a wooden crate twenty paces away, Fellis Dain had spread four lightweight wooden paddles, a pot of black tar-paint, and strips of dyed linen canvas.
“Let’s try the flags first,” Fellis said, raising his voice so it carried across the wind. He held up a box-shaped piece of bright scarlet cloth tacked to a four-foot ash wand, and a matching pennon of lemon-yellow wool. “Red for stop and hold line. Yellow for living blocker inside the boundary. Red is what the caravan guards use for road closure, so everyone knows the color.”
Kezra shook her head before he could lift the stick.
“We know what happened at the sixty-four-pace exchange on Day 44, Fellis,” she said. She walked toward the crate. “You were standing sixty paces off at the north anchor, shouting into a forty-mile gale while sixty thousand yards of bedrock started to chime. Between the wind, the sounding deep ring. The blood roaring in my head, I couldn’t hear whether you…
