The highway she was on continued straight up to Danbury, where it widened and merged with Interstate 84, a massive multi-lane road that seemed to skirt the edge of Danbury and then curve up toward Candlewood Lake. “That will be the easiest route,” she said quietly, “but also the most obvious. If they’re watching anything, they’ll be watching that.” She searched through the city itself, following the major roads and looking for other options, and marked the two major hospitals with her pencil. All the post-Break settlements, human and Partial, tended to cluster around hospitals, and the Ivies might be the same. “Might be,” she reminded herself. Morgan’s records had reported them farther north, on or around the lake itself, and with lake and city so close together it was telling, she thought, that the scouts had placed them specifically at the lake. “Maybe they don’t like cities,” she mused. “I’m not a big fan, either, but I’m an outsider—if this is their home territory, they could secure the city and get a lot of defensive advantages the lake can’t offer. Unless they’re searching for advantages I’m not considering.” She looked closer at the lake, wondering what those advantages might be. Fresh water, certainly, and maybe the longer sight lines across the water. Any hunting or farming they wanted to do in the wilderness would be just as easy in the city; she had grown up doing the same in the dense urban areas of Long Island. It didn’t seem to make sense. She looked at her notes again: the Ivies were “strongly opposed to medical experimentation.” That was all the information she had. She stared at the map, still completely unsure how best to approach it.