She was already awake when I arrived.
Of course she was. I was beginning to understand that Maren existed slightly outside the normal rhythms of time — that she woke when things required waking for, slept when nothing urgent pressed, and had long ago stopped organizing her life around clocks.
She was at her table with a lamp and three books that looked older than the compound, and when I came through the door she looked up and said, "How many?"
"Three," I said. "Cold signatures. No wolf frequency."
She closed the book in front of her with the careful reverence of someone handling something irreplaceable. "Sit down, Seraphina."
I sat. My hands were steadier than they had a right to be.
"Tell me exactly what they felt like," she said. "Everything. Don't edit."
I told her. The cold-sto
