That evening, as dusk gathered beneath the high pine canopy, Kezra Venn confronted a persistent technical error that had plagued her cross sightings all afternoon.
Beneath the dense, shifting boughs of Hushwood, the sunlight didn’t fall in steady, uniform planes. It filtered through moving needles in mottled, dancing patches of glare and deep shadow that tricked the eye, making an upright sighting wand appear to lean two to three inches to the left or right across a distance of sixteen paces.
Worse still was the ground beneath their boots.
In this subalpine basin, the underlying limestone was shot through with nodules of dark, magnetic ironstone and bog-iron deposits that deflected the needle of Kezra’s brass compass by two to three degrees over a single Plot boundary.
Under Fixed Mechanic #2, every parcel prism had to be strictly lined up to sky north, with zero rotation allowed. If a compass bending or a dappled shadow error introduced a three-degree rotation into a sixteen-pace Plot square, the outer corner anchor marks would be cut at the wrong compass bearing. The bonded notebook would reject the entire circuit at the moment of activation.
Kezra sat on an upturned firing crate on the pale limestone bench, her brow furrowed as she compared three conflicting magnetic bearings in her field book.
