The morning came up amber and violet, same as every morning in the three hundred and forty-something days since the aperture had sealed. Cael had stopped counting exactly around month four. It hadn't been a decision. The number had just slipped one day and he hadn't bothered to retrieve it.
He was squatting at the edge of the safe zone, one hand pressed flat against the Record-native surface, reading the ground through Hollow Step before he committed weight to it. The creatures that had waited at the base that first night were long gone. The exclusion zone had held, and whatever relationship the local fauna had with the old architecture, it wasn't something they tested twice.
He stepped off the structure.
The living ground received his weight with the familiar give of something that had
