At sunrise on Day 67, the frost along the roadside was melting into clear beads under a pale yellow sun as the expedition climbed the final limestone grade to the roadside weighing station.
The station sat on an open bench where the upland cart track met the graded timber highway. It was a familiar site. Here, on Day 15 of her first outward journey, Kezra Venn had completed her sixth circuit, mapping the sixteen-pace stone apron around the iron weighing scales. On Day 50, during the hurried return march from Saltglass, she had walked past the station in the rain, discovered that winter runoff had pushed the eastern retaining wall outward into a bulging belly of loose stone. Then she made the painful, disciplined choice to remotely retire the address rather than leave an unstable site live in her book.
Today, stepping across the outer edge of the old parcel was not merely a sentimental reunion. It was a working requirement.
Under Fixed Mechanic #5, a nonstop route between two paired sites had to be personally walked by the map maker within the last thirty days. Walking her boots across the weighing-station apron today refreshed the nonstop chain from Kilnstep, sewing her home defense anchors to the northern highway without a single unmeasured gap.
