CHAPTER XIII - The Valley of Continuation

The journey lasted long enough that distance stopped behaving like a number.

At first, I had counted kilometers because measurement gave the unknown a structure I could hold. Later, I counted failed landmarks: relay fields crossed, cities bypassed, dry rivers followed, mountain ridges climbed, signal losses endured and recovered. Eventually even those measures became insufficient. The ELE410 trace had entered the rhythm of my movement so completely that I no longer felt I was traveling toward it. I was traveling within the consequence of having found it. The signal became pressure, orientation, and question. It did not hurry me. It did not comfort me. It simply continued.

The land changed by degrees.

For weeks, the signal had led across terrain increasingly difficult to classify as ordinary surface infrastructure. Roads appeared where no settlement justified them, broad and heavily reinforced, their edges buried beneath stonefall but their direction still aligned with the trace. Subsurface conduits followed the same vector in bundles too large for local use. I found maintenance towers without surrounding cities, atmospheric regulators built into ridgelines, buried power arteries whose casings had resisted time far better than municipal grids. Everything suggested a system withdrawing from public geography into protected depth.

Ksara recognized the pattern before I did.