The Settlement of Highland: Book One - Brass Line: 1

A hazardous-materials surveyor walks a hill on the west end of a New England mill city with a ground-penetrating radar cart and a job to finish. The hill is eleven acres of scrub and fill above a river that used to run brass. The town history says it was never settled. Aileen Foley is thirty-four, and she reads ground for a living. Not artifacts, not placement-fill layers, cut-and-fill, compaction, where soil was moved and when. It is not glamorous, and it is not archaeology, and it pays. What comes up on her screen over four working days is a pattern of disturbances at a regular interval, running off her survey in both directions, under a hill that the record says nobody ever built on. She writes it up as anomalies. That is the honest word, and it is the word she uses. Then she finds one thing that is not in the grid. In April of 1674 a surveying party laid out thirty-two eight-acre lots on a highland above a river, and two men in one room afterward meant different things by the phrase *"layd out," and the room produced no answer. Two years later the war came through. The lots were never taken up. The paper survived, and the street did not. *The Settlement of Highland* opens *The Brass Line*, a six-volume series beginning in 2070-the successor to the nine-volume *Island of Bones-and readable without it. It is a book about the difference between a thing that is hidden and a thing that was simply never asked about, and about a woman whose whole professional competence is knowing what has been done to a piece of ground and when. She has a width, a bearing, and an interval. She does not have a count, and the number she is missing is the one the atlas has been holding for three hundred years.