She'd been at Shadowmere for two years now — long enough that the diagram at Halcyon had a footnote crediting her own modifications, long enough that Aldis had stopped supervising her work directly and started simply reviewing it, the way you reviewed the work of someone whose judgment you trusted.
It was Iris who found the gap.
Not in the compound's perimeter — Shadowmere's coverage was, by now, about as tight as Aldis's redesign and three additional years of refinement could make it. The gap Iris found was in the Ledger's network itself, the territorial coverage map Neva maintained, the one that showed every territory the framework had reached and every one it hadn't.
There was a corridor — four territories in a row, strung along the western coastal range, none of them connected to th
