I arrived at the north perimeter gate to find two figures already inside the outer wall.
Not at the gate — inside it. Standing beside the gate housing with the quality of people who had been waiting, not entering. The guard rotation's log showed no entry event. The outer-layer detection had not triggered. Caleb, who had been at the monitoring station when the scout alert came through, had confirmed the contact and then arrived at the gate to find the contact already past every system he'd designed to catch it.
They had passed through the outer perimeter without touching it.
I ran that through the operational models I had available. None of them contained it. The outer perimeter's detection architecture had been designed and tested and refined across the operational months of the war; it
