The ridge was quiet except for the sound of my boots on the damp earth and the soft sway of pine overhead. I had told Liora I was making another perimeter run. That was true. It was also an excuse to think without her eyes on me.
“You are avoiding her,” Ace said, his voice a steady thrum in the back of my mind.
“I’m walking the line,” I answered.
“You are walking in circles,” he said. “You do that when you are trying to argue yourself out of something you already decided,”
“I haven’t decided anything,” I lied.
“Yes, you have. You just don’t like it,” he shot back. I kept my pace steady, checking each marker I had set over the past months. The broken branch here, the scuffed bark there, the rock turned just enough to see from a distance. All still in place. No fresh tracks cutting the
