She woke at five with the field different again.
Not the slow continuous advance she'd felt yesterday — this was sharper, more localised, a single point of contact rather than a creeping boundary. Far to the northeast, well beyond where the field had reached overnight, something had touched the edge of the reach and recoiled.
Not a person.
A structure.
Lena lay in the dark and tried to understand what she was feeling — not a frequency, not a fragment, not anything with the quality of a person, scattered or whole. Something more like a wall, in the literal sense this time: the field's warmth reaching toward something and meeting, immediately, a hard edge, the specific quality of a defence that had been built, deliberately, to register exactly this kind of approach and respond to it.
Sh
