One heartbeat. That was all I had, and I'd learned in this war that the wolves who survive are the ones who use the heartbeat instead of freezing in it.
So I didn't react to Vale's question the way alarm would react, or the way dismissal would. I reacted the way a bored Luna reacts to a minor administrative matter the one reaction that reveals nothing because it contains nothing.
"Scavengers, probably," I said, not looking up from the tally sheets I'd been reading, letting my attention stay half on them, giving Vale the picture of a wolf too busy with real work to care about an empty house in the hills. "The old properties draw them. It's been happening since the war abandoned estates, no one guarding them." I made a small note in the margin, unhurried. "Send someone if you like, Vale, b
