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“Send a patrol team.”
“A patrol team doesn’t know what a compromised anchor feels like. Sloane grew up around ward infrastructure. Garrett’s old territory ran on a similar system before the banishment. She’ll recognize the signature faster than anyone we have.”
Chris set his mug down. “Alone?”
“She volunteered.”
Of course she had. Chris looked at the map, at the red line Viktor had drawn along the northwest corridor, the section that had let Garrett through twice already.
“I’ll go with her.”
Viktor’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. “She didn’t ask for backup.”
“She’s not going to ask. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t need it.”
He found her in the equipment shed twenty minutes later, checking a compass against a folded map, her hair pulled back, a canvas bag slung over one shoulder. She looked up when the door opened, and her face closed before she’d fully registered who it was.
“No,” she said.
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“You’re going to say you’re coming with me.”
“I’m coming with you.”
She zipped the bag shut. “I don’t need a bodyguard.”
“You’re mapping a security vulnerability that your father has already exploited twice. I’m not asking permission.”
“Then why did you phrase it like a request?”
“Habit.” He leaned against the doorframe. “Here’s the actual reason. You know ward architecture. I know how Garrett’s people move when they think no one’s watching. You catch the technical gaps. I catch the tactical ones. Viktor gets a complete map instead of half of one.”
She studied him. He watched her run the logic, testing it for the soft spot that would let her dismiss it, and not finding one.
“Fine,” she said. “But you carry your own water.”
“I always do.”
They left through the east gate at eight, following the boundary line Viktor had marked, working outward from the northwest corridor where the last two breaches had happened. Sloane crouched at the first ward anchor, a waist-high iron post buried in packed earth, and pressed her palm flat against the stone cap.
“This one’s solid,” she said. “The hum’s even.”
“How do you know what even feels like?”
“My father kept a training ward around our old property. Same principle, cruder execution. I used to sit against the posts when I was small. You learn the rhythm without meaning to.”
She moved to the next anchor, forty meters on. Chris walked the tree line beside her, scanning for disturbed brush, broken branches, anything that read as a path cut deliberately through undergrowth that should have been undisturbed.
“Footprints,” he said, crouching. “Two sets. Old. Maybe a week.”
Sloane came over, studied the ground, then the angle of approach. “They stopped here. They didn’t cross.”
“They were testing the ward, not breaching it.”
“Same as before.” She straightened. “He’s patient. He was always patient. He’d sit for hours waiting for the exact moment a person… a system showed weakness.”
They kept moving—mostly in silence. The morning built into afternoon, the sun climbing high enough to burn through the treeline. They fell into a rhythm neither of them commented on. She marked the anchors on her map with a code only she understood. He tracked movement patterns on his own notebook, cross-referencing them against patrol schedules Viktor had given him.
