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“This gap’s wider than the last one,” Sloane said, kneeling at an anchor near the south ridge. “The stone’s cracked. See here.” She traced a hairline fracture running down the post. “Someone’s been striking this. Repeatedly. Trying to weaken it without breaking it outright.”

“How long would that take?”

“Weeks. Longer, if he’s being careful. He wants it to fail on its own, so no one traces the cause.”

Chris crouched beside her, close enough to see the fracture clearly. “You can read all that from a crack in a rock.”

“I can read a lot from small things. It’s a survival skill.” She said it simply, a melancholy smile crossing her lips.

Midday brought them to a stretch where the boundary cut through dense pine, the anchors spaced further apart than anywhere else on the perimeter.

“Why the gap in coverage here?” Chris asked.

“Budget, probably. Original construction crews always run short by the time they hit the far corners.” Sloane crouched at the base of a post, checking the seating of the stone against the earth. “Cheaper to space them wide and hope the terrain does the work. Dense pine slows a runner down. Someone assumed that was protection enough.”

“Is it?”

“No. It just means whoever comes through here has to be patient. Garrett has patience to spare.” She stood, wiped her hands on her trousers. “I’d recommend Viktor close this gap first. Not the ones that have already been tested. The one nobody’s thought to test yet.”

Chris made a note. “You’d make a pretty good tactician.”

“I’d make a better one than most people in that briefing room give me credit for.”

“I never said you wouldn’t.”

“You didn’t have to. I can read a room.” She kept walking, and he let the comment sit rather than argue it, because arguing it would have proven her point.

They ate lunch standing, passing a canteen of water back and forth.

“He’s not trying to get in yet,” Chris said. “He’s building a door he can open later, whenever he wants.”

“That’s exactly what he’s doing.” Sloane capped the canteen and handed it back. “He did the same thing to my mother. Small failures, spaced out, nothing anyone could point to and call a pattern until it was too late to stop it.”

“What happened to your mother?”

She looked at him, and for a second something moved behind her eyes, something that might have been the start of an answer. Then she picked up her bag and kept walking.

By late afternoon they’d covered most of the western boundary. The light had gone gold and long, slanting through the trees at an angle that turned the dust they kicked up into something almost visible. Sloane knelt at the last anchor on the list, ran her hand along the stone, and nodded once.

“This one’s clean.”

“Good note to end on.”

She sat back on her heels, not moving to stand yet. Chris lowered himself onto a fallen log a few feet away, his legs stiff from the day’s walking, and let the quiet settle.

“My aunt used to test the wards like this,” Sloane said, not looking at him. “Iris. She’d walk the fence line every evening before dark, just to be sure. I used to think it was paranoia. Now I think it was the only kind of love she knew how to show.”

“Testing fences.”

“Making sure nothing could get in while I slept.” She pulled a blade of grass loose, turned it between her fingers. “She never said it like that. She’d just come back inside and tell me the fence was fine, and I’d feel my shoulders drop without knowing why.”

“She sounds like she cared about you.”

“She did.” A small, unguarded smile. “She used to burn toast on purpose. Said the smoke kept the bugs out of the kitchen. It didn’t. She just liked an excuse to sit with the window open and talk to me while it cooled.”

Chris laughed, and she looked at him properly for the first time all day, no wall behind her eyes, just a woman remembering something good.

“What did you talk about?”