Aldis ran the perimeter the way other people kept diaries.
Three years at Shadowmere, and her assessment notes had become, without anyone planning it, a kind of personal record — not of feelings, never that, but of patterns. Which sections of the eastern boundary flooded in spring. Which trees had been struck by lightning and needed clearing before they fell on the fence line. Which months the deer moved through and which months the wolves from the next territory over got curious about the gap in the treeline that wasn't actually a gap, just looked like one from certain angles.
She'd been doing the same loop for three years. She knew it better than she'd known anything in Silver Creek, where she'd spent most of her life moving — patrol routes that changed weekly so nobody could predict t
