CHAPTER XIII - A Current Without a River

The corridor lay cracked and forgotten, a fracture carved through the bones of the world.

It stretched between two abandoned energy sectors where the old planetary grid had once carried power across continents with such precision that cities rose and slept according to rhythms no longer governed by nature. The passage had not been built for walking. It had been designed as a current channel, a deep infrastructural artery through which pure energy once moved beneath the surface of Earth, feeding towers, atmospheric shields, orbital uplinks, and entire populations who had never needed to see the systems sustaining them.

Now the channel was dry.

Two ancient slabs of former energy flow marked its edges, their surfaces dulled to a pale reflection of what once pulsed beneath them. Time had stripped away most of the active conduits, leaving only blackened grooves, fractured light veins, and sections of exposed crystalline lattice embedded inside stone like frozen lightning. Long ago, brilliance had streamed through here without interruption. It had moved too fast for sight, too controlled to be called wild, transforming distance into function and survival into infrastructure.

Now nothing moved.