Chapter 342: Range
The gorge gave them up slowly.
Two days of climbing broken stone before the highland levelled out and the walking turned easy. Kai set the pace. The Origin Body did not tire the way the old one had. He noticed it on the first long slope and filed it — less cost in the legs, less cost in the chest, less cost everywhere.
Soren walked behind him with an instrument strapped open across his pack, reading as they went. Mira kept the vault pair wrapped at her hip. Yara walked at the side of the trail more than on it, stopping often to look at grass and write things down.
They were going home, in the way the survey had a home. Back toward the nine zones he had chained. Back into range.
He had left that range to make the breakthrough. Now he was returning to it as something the range had never been read by before.
By the third day the ground began to feel familiar.
