I woke, and the world was breathing.
And not in a metaphorical way — I could physically feel it. The earth under my hands pulsated, slow and rhythmic as a heartbeat through stone. The horizon was touched lightly with veins of gold which bled gently into the dawn sky. The ruins about me — yesterday dead steel and stubble of ashes — hummed with low return.
And I suddenly knew, with a cold shock running down my spine, that the rhythm was my own heart beat.
I wasn’t lying on the world. I was inside it.
I felt my hands shaking as I leaned up. The flesh of my left palm where the glass had become a part of me now carried a faint light mark, like the roots of a tree, or the circuits of some lost machine. It shimmered just faintly under the surface of my skin.
“Wren?” I whispered, trying the n
