"In what way?"
"In the way that says somebody once built logistics here." He looked around the storehouse again. "You don't pack travel food this well unless movement, distance, and return once meant something."
Rhaen let that sit in her chest. Return.
The word felt uglier inside this place.
Something clicked on a roof nearby.
Then another.
Not ant clicks.
Wood settling.
Or pretending to settle.
One of the worker feeds went still.
Mikhailis's expression flattened. "There it is."
A door in the house across the lane opened inward with a slow scrape.
No hand touched it.
Dust lifted in the street like something heavy had exhaled through the village.
Rhaen was on her feet before the second breath finished. "We were too loud?"
"No."
"Then how?"
He looked toward the roofline where the frozen ant feed hovered in place. "Because this place reads itself."
The village was not abandoned. Not meaningfully.
It was dormant.
And now it was waking.
