The boundary stones had not failed to answer a recognition signal in the fourteen months since the coalition finished the eastern network, and Marina had grown so used to that particular silence meaning safety that the sound of the horn's single low note landed in her chest like something physically striking her.

Silvain was moving before the note finished. Marina followed, the letter still clutched in one hand, Halvard's granddaughter's frightened face burned into the back of her mind alongside the name Renna and the shape of the second signature and the cold certainty that whatever was coming had been choreographed to arrive exactly now, while the pack's attention was...