Beeley Wood Road: twelve residential properties, gutters clear, doorstep polished, psycmask designation in a colour with no category name and no explanation. Never once assigned for routine civic assessment. The buildings are maintained. They are not occupied. The available evidence suggests the occupants are expected back — by whom, and when, the district records do not say.

Down by the Rivelin in high murk — me and shad minding our own business when a barker that looked like the chaotic offspring of a ripperthroat and something considerably worse went for Shad's leg, apparently for sport. Its owner was apologetic; I gave him the standard warning about The Nascenti compliance. The organic network polices its own out there, eventually.

Official Dark Peak District Council broadcasts advise residents not to engage with crosslanders on the grounds they are armed and dangerous — though the same broadcasts describe the crosslands as populated by "dissidents, mental incontinents and morons," which does complicate the threat assessment. Remain on the Hellsborough side of the Great Causeway, they say. Most do.

Longlegs station themselves at the edge of things — the tree line, the broken wall, the place where one territory becomes another — and they have been there longer than you have, whatever you think you remember about arriving first. A hare, approximately, except the legs are jointed incorrectly and it moves low and fast like water finding a drain. The hive-mind has no record of them; the nascenti consider this a minor data gap, and I consider that a serious error of judgement.