Chapter 336: The Nine
The road west ran flat for three days, and for three days the map behind him went quiet.
Zone Eleven left first, though there had never been much there to lose. It had read as bare ground even up close. By a half-day's walk it was simply gone from the Ambient Map, the way an empty room is gone the moment you step out of it.
Then Zone Ten. The four markers he had set in the deep stone still held their place. But the Ambient Map did not read them. They were carrier-function marks, not network points. By the second morning Zone Ten was a blank behind him, a square of waiting he could no longer feel.
He walked on into the silence between the far ground and the network, and read nothing under his feet but old, patient stone.
He had grown used to that silence over the long-range work. What he had not expected was how it ended.
It came back the way it had gone — one zone at a time, but in reverse.
