The Westlands smelled of salt and rust and old bargains. Where the road split and the map had surrendered, a town lay half-remembered: roofs gone to skeleton, shopfronts frozen mid-transaction, the ghosts of prices still pinned to the walls. Xenos moved through that ruin as if he were a debt collector quiet, accurate, tracing signatures left by whatever had passed.
He was there because a thread had sung differently. Threads were not things most people heard; they were the thin discrepancies in causality that a man like Xenos could follow like a hound follows scent. Tonight the thread tasted of absence: not the absence of people, but the absence of origins places where history should have anchored itself and did not.
He had left Micron behind by order, not cruelty. Micron had protested un
