Page 76 of Legacy Elite

Declan turns approximately the color of a stop sign.

Then me.

"You need to spend more time in your shifted form," she says.

"Yes."

"You took off on different scent trails. Twice." She writes. "You also got a stretcher and four people up a fifteen-foot bank, and your team stopped treating you like a mascot at some point this morning."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't praise. It was a note."

Brann closes the notebook.

"Bus is at half past. Somebody help Ines."

Freya finds me that evening in the sitting room of my suite, where Sophia is asleep on my couch and Renzo is eating. Again.

She puts the rubbing down on the coffee table.

The border came through clean and unbroken, one hard line around the outside.

The center is a mess.

We both look at it.

"Someone really didn't want anybody knowing what was there," Freya says.

"No."

I run my finger just above the paper, following the empty circle.

Three stones that we know about.

However many more we didn't have time to find. And every one of them with the same thing missing.

Chapter ten

Jessica

The coordinates match.

I've got Renzo's numbers on a torn page under my left hand and a photocopy of an estate survey under my right, and the survey is old enough that the paper's gone the color of weak tea, and I have spent forty minutes getting the two of them onto the same scale.

The line of stones we walked past on Tuesday is a boundary on this map.

Not near a boundary. Not roughly along one. It's the line. Three of the marks Renzo took sit on it within what the archive assistant tells me is normal survey error for something drawn by hand.

So that's confirmed. That stone wasn't a bit of old masonry somebody dropped in a wood. It was doing a job. It was standing there saying this side is ours, with a crest, until somebody came out with a tool and disagreed.

I sit back.

And that's when I actually look at the rest of the map.

Because I've been so busy with the eastern boundary that I haven't followed the line round. It runs north, and then west, and then it turns and comes down and encloses — everything. The whole Preserve. The valley the academy sits in. All of it, one continuous estate, with the ordinary bloodless annotations of a surveyor at every corner.

And near the middle of it, up where the ground goes high, there's a small drawn square with a name beside it.