The third formation was different before he touched it.
He knew it from two metres out, the Depth Sense reading below the surface and returning something that didn't match the first two formations' content profile. The first two had been dense with accumulated distress, the membrane's damage record layered over years, complex and structural and impersonal the way geological records were impersonal, the history of forces rather than choices.
This one had a person in it.
He stood in front of it and felt the Hollow Hound go very still behind his sternum and understood from the Hound's stillness that whatever was in here was something it recognized and had been waiting for him to reach.
He put his hand against the surface.
The absorption began, and the warmth moved through his palm, and i
