Line Captain Tissadelle Shepherd (Human)

The morning came up over the Boirinn Uplands the way it had come up every morning of her childhood: grey first, then the particular gold that only the Union's home star threw, then the smell of the flock somewhere below the house. She stood at the low wall her great-grandmother had built and let the light find her, and it was so exactly right that she noticed, distantly, that she had not decided to come here.

That was the first thing. She filed it the way she filed everything — without alarm, because alarm was a response you gave before you understood the problem, and she had never seen the use of it. She simply noted: I do not remember arriving. And then, because the note asked for it: I do not remember leaving Threshold.

The wall was cold under her hand. She could feel the grain of the stone, the lichen, the give where the third course had shifted a century before anyone thought to reset it. All of it was there. None of it was thin. If this was a memory she was walking through, it was a memory with more in it than she had ever put into one.

She looked down at the hill and could not, for a moment, find the coordinate string. Item sixteen. The unfiled Hollow, the phase-lag in the leaves, the thing she had chosen not to write down. It should have been there — the hill was here, entire, and the Hollow was part of the hill. But when she reached for the exact place her mother had walked her to, the place with the rule and no reason, the hillside offered her the place readily, too readily, and offered it twice, at two different distances from the house, and she stood holding both and understood that a hillside is not supposed to be able to do that.

A real hill, she thought, in the flat interior voice she used for reports she intended to stand behind, has one of everything.

She did not panic. She was aware that this was itself worth noting — that a person standing on a hill that had just produced two of the same clearing might reasonably be expected to feel something sharper than professional interest. She felt professional interest. She wondered, with the part of her that never fully turned off, whether that was because she was steady, or because whatever she was standing in did not yet contain enough of her to be afraid with.

Below her, the door of the house opened, and her mother came out to take in the morning, exactly as her mother had, and Tissadelle went down the hill to meet her, because that was what you did, and because she wanted to very badly, and because she had not yet worked out that wanting something this much was, here, a kind of evidence.