The entire morning passed without a single hostile contact.
In a volatile coastal zone that had already thrown them two massive positioning errors and a premature ambush, a quiet morning was a very loud warning. It meant the monsters were currently elsewhere, organizing something much worse.
Fen ran complex field variance readings every twenty minutes as they hiked. By her third reading, she finally found the invisible deviation she had been hunting for. Vane watched her work in silence. He did not ask her what she was seeing. He trusted that she would tell him the second she had enough hard data to be tactically useful.
She finally approached him at eleven forty-seven.
She handed him a single page ripped from her notebook. It displayed a flawlessly drawn approach vector, an entry point circled in thick charcoal, a density estimate tucked into the upper right corner, and a strict time projection at the very bottom.
