By the second light the field hadn't moved and neither had the read.
The threads were still flat.
The bodies had started to argue, frost aiming at doors, heat rotating toward halls, but their minds stayed clean of him.
He was marking the perimeter on the officer's slate when he found out he wasn't alone out here.
There was a shack at the edge of the severance, low and built into the dirt, with a man sitting on a stump in front of it who'd watched Soren walk the whole line and hadn't said a word until now.
"You're standing in it wrong," the man said. "The reach bends north. You'll log it short."
◆◆◆◆
His name was Edmund Garrow and he'd been guarding the site longer than the academy had known it was here.
He had a tamer's calluses on a hand that hadn't held a bond in a long time.
"They send a kid every few years," Garrow said. "To measure it, you're the first one with six threads on him."
Soren sat on the dirt across from the stump and didn't ask how he knew.
