They found the thread on the third day.
Wren found it.
Not by looking — by feeling, the Keeper's ability running at its full restored range, the threads between people and places and the connections that sustained communities over distance registering in Wren's awareness the way the Cost Sense registered the present-tense cost of suppression in Oren's.
"There," Wren said.
They were on the eastern road, two days past the kingdom's boundary, moving through farming country that was the same as the kingdom's farming country in geography but different in System quality — the honest architecture running thinner here, the monitoring infrastructure older and less maintained, the specific character of institutional momentum that had outlasted the institution actively maintaining it.
Wren pointed north.
Off the road.
Into farmland.
