Chapter 308: Gene Event
Day Five. Zone Two.
Kai had not slept well.
That was a fact. He noted it without further comment, sat at the edge of the depression in the dark before sunrise, and let the carrier function read what it could from the surface. At standing depth — no descent — he could feel the shape of the twelve anchor positions in the deep rock below. Each one a fixed point he had matched and held across four days of careful work.
They were still there.
But the rock around them was not the same.
Basement rock had no grain, no direction, but it had character — that even, compressed, absolute quality that made point-matching possible. The character at each anchor position was still present. What had changed was what the character sat inside. Four days ago, the compression had been uniform through every section. What he could read now was different. An unevenness. Not a break. The way a bruise sat under skin — the surface unchanged, the material beneath it wrong.
