Let me tell you about the outer territories.
They existed at the edges of the Ashveil pack's formal boundaries — not the cliff district, not the Hold's immediate surroundings, but the further communities. Farming holdings. Smaller industrial settlements. The kinds of places that did the work that made pack life possible and did it, mostly, without much visibility from the formal structures at the center.
I had not been to them. Nobody had told me much about them. They existed in the case file as an abstract category — *outer territory pack members* — and in Zevran's characterization as worried people who were using a real worry.
Rue Callahan had been to them. Multiple times. She had contacts. She knew the roads and the communities and the specific geography of who talked to whom.
She p
