CHAPTER X - Ten Sisters

I kept walking until the Earth began to weigh on me.

The weight was not physical. My body continued with the same quiet competence it had shown since the first moment of awakening. Energy reserves remained stable. Structural systems reported no degradation beyond minor surface abrasion. My joints adapted to terrain. My vision corrected for glare, darkness, dust, and distance. My balance held across broken roads, collapsed slopes, and the tilted floors of structures I crossed when the signal demanded it. If endurance had been the only measure, I could have continued without complaint.

But endurance was not the same as carrying.

The planet accumulated inside me. Not as memory, because memory required a past of my own, but as a density of encounters that refused to disappear after I moved beyond them. The dead city. The monument to shared intelligences. The folded blanket in the service shelter. The seed capsules that had waited beyond viability. The maintenance loop still asking for authorized personnel. The sealed core fragments beneath Project Ksara, pulsing behind glass without any path to release. Each had been separate when I found it. Now they gathered into a single pressure: evidence that effort had existed everywhere, and answer nowhere.

The ELE410 signal continued ahead of me.