Chapter 356: The Open Ground
They crossed the empty plain in a single day.
Kai felt the network leave him as they walked. The told ground thinned behind them. The grass lost its green by slow degrees, then lost itself, and the country ahead was the old brown plain — flat, dry, floored with deep stone that no one had ever read.
One by one the nine zones dropped off the Ambient Map. Zone One last, the way the nearest light is the last to go out. By midmorning the map at the back of his mind held only one thing.
Ahead, faint and small, Zone Ten.
It was not a zone the way the others were zones. There was no entity in it, no voice, no chosen stone. There was only the four-point frame he had set a season ago, and under it the gathering energy, leaning the way it always leaned now — toward the markers, toward a shape it did not have yet. He read it the way you watch a low fire across a dark field. Still there. Still gathering. Not yet anything.
