547.
Sky going gray at the edges. Streetlights still on. The mural sun with eleven rays and a face, watching us.
I stood in the middle of the intersection with the bat off my back and let myself look at the thing I'd been avoiding all night.
Because I could see it now. That was the part that had my stomach in a knot.
With the new sense, the block wasn't a block. It was a diagram. The trans-dimensional particulate hung in the air in a lattice, and the lattice had corners. It had a center. It had four points where the density spiked, one at each street mouth, arranged with a symmetry that no wound in reality has ever bothered with.
Someone had drawn this. On the ground. Under the asphalt. Weeks ago, probably. And then they'd walked away and let it cook.
Confirmed, Nel said. Four anchor nodes. Geometry is artificial. Estimated construction window, eleven to fourteen days. The formation is not opening. It is being opened.
"By who."
