They went through at 11:14 PM.
The approach took longer than the standard boundary crossing because the optimal vector Kael had mapped ran through a section of the Echo that required navigating two blocks of tightly packed residual-presence zones, areas where the empty shapes of people clustered with the density of a crowded public space.
Moving through these zones without triggering orientation required running Resonance at minimum broadcast, nothing more than a whisper of outward signal while maintaining full inward reception.
Mara moved through the zone without discussion. She had been doing this for two years. Her ability management was automatic in the way that any deeply practiced skill became automatic, the technique running below conscious attention so that conscious attention could focus on the environment rather than the mechanics.
He matched her broadcast profile. They reached the optimal entry vector at 11:09 PM.
The Bleed boundary pressed outward at this angle with the weight of something much denser than the Echo. Even with the reduced broadcast, even at the thickest differential point he had mapped, the sensation of the Bleed on the other side of the boundary was substantial. Not threatening. Dense.
The way a very large building felt substantial from the street, not because it was going to do anything but because it was present in a way that registered.
Mara stood beside him.
"Ready," she said.
"Ready," he said.
They stepped through. The Bleed received them like a change in pressure. The first thing was the color. Wrong was the accurate word and he had been told it was wrong and had filed that information as understood but understanding the information and experiencing the information were different things.
The red that was not quite red. The blue at the edge of the spectrum that had no name because human color language had not needed a name for it. The sky that was the color of something that had been bruised and not healed. He looked at it and his brain tried to map it onto the surface world's color categories and kept missing.
The second thing was the sound. Low, constant, resonant. The sound of a very large thing existing at its natural frequency. Not loud. Omnipresent. He felt it in his back teeth.
The third thing was Resonance.The ability lit up at a level he was not prepared for. He staggered.
Not physically. The stagger was in his processing, the mental equivalent of walking into a room expecting lamplight and finding daylight.
Every surface in the Bleed was broadcasting frequency. Every building, every street, every piece of the Bleed's architecture had its own signal and the signals were dense and layered and complex in ways that the Echo's signals were not. The Echo had been quiet by comparison.
A library at closing time. The Bleed was a library in full operation, every shelf active, every reader present, every document out of its place and being read simultaneously.
He modulated down hard. He narrowed the reception as far as it would go without losing functional use of the ability. Better. Manageable.
"Your Resonance spiked," Mara said quietly. Her voice was calibrated for the Bleed's acoustic environment automatically. "I felt the broadcast amplitude before you caught it."
"I caught it in four seconds," he said.
"Three would be better."
"Three would be better," he agreed.
They stood still for thirty seconds, both of them running only the minimum necessary signal, both of them reading the immediate environment before moving into it.
The Bleed's city extended around them. Larger than the Echo's city. The same surface-world street grid at its bones but expanded and amended with additional passages and additional structures that had no surface-world equivalents.
The buildings were taller here and built in proportions that were almost human and were not.
At the windows and in the doorways: the residuals.
He had read Aiken's description. Reading about them and seeing them were, again, different things.
They were human in general outline. Two arms, two legs, upright posture, a head at the top. The details were wrong in specific ways that varied from residual to residual: a proportion that did not follow the logic of the others, a stillness that was too complete, an orientation that did not account for the physics of what they appeared to be doing. A residual that appeared to be looking out of a window was oriented at an angle that would require its neck to work in a direction a neck did not work.
They did not move. They watched.
One of them turned its head to track Kael's position. He did not look at it directly.
"Aiken was right about the tracking mechanism," he said quietly. "Frequency not form."
"I have read Aiken's account four times," Mara said. "His description is accurate at this level of penetration. I have no data on whether it remains accurate deeper in."
"We go deeper," he said. "We go carefully deeper," she said. They walked.