Iris found the pattern before Tavri did, the way she usually found things — not through the attunement, which wasn't hers, but through the patient, careful work of noticing shapes that didn't match.
"Hollowmere's not unique," she said, six months into the western corridor work, the two of them now established in a small rented room in the territory's modest center, the closest thing to a base of operations the corridor had offered them. "I've been mapping the records of the second territory — Ashwell, the one bordering Hollowmere to the north. There's a similar gap. No formal organizational presence, nothing matching the mechanism's known pattern. But the same quality of — absence. No outside contact in decades."
"You think it's the same thing," Tavri said. "Grief, calcified."
"I think
