The little spot pulses, and its outline fizzes, turning blocky where heavy pixels can’t quite render the curve. Another throb, and it begins to grow, swelling until it’s the size of a hand with fingers stretched. It looks like something coming into focus on a long-range scope, tessellating as the displays try to magnify a distant speck of light into something worth looking at. The middle of the spot goes dark, the red turning scabby while I watch, then darker still, until it’s almost black. The edges brighten from ruby to a kind of ruddy yellow, like blood thinning down to plasma.

I lean in closer and let the visor pick the details out.

It’s starting to look a little like an eye.

I don’t have time to realise my mistake. The spot erupts, so bright it turns my visor to white-wash and leaves me blinking. Reflex brought my hands up, but all it’s done is burn their shadows into my vision, outlines flickering while my eyes recover from the shock. When the haze finally clears, I find myself standing in the middle of a dawn, the room lit from every angle, blaring golden and chaotic from displays on every side. It feels like I’m out on the wind again, like the Stone has dropped its walls and given us a look out at the wind. At least, it would do if the picture wasn’t grainy and out of focus, jerking awkwardly as new data fills the feed.

In the middle of it all is the same dark spot. It’s bigger now: a black heart rimmed in pulsing red, the outline churning where it turns to storm-surge and interference. At first there’s only static, but I can see where the feed starts to curdle, pale eddies showing against an amber ocean. I can see the storms throwing phantoms across the light, the heavy clouds that orbit the Eye itself, the rip tides cutting through them. I can see through the haze of dust and fire, and the deep-froth shadows that rise and fall around us. The patterns that turn inside.

“I can see why they wrote it off,” I say, without really thinking. “I don’t know how you’d get anything that your eyes couldn’t manage on their own.”

Hail takes a moment to answer. I look back to find her standing in the middle of the room, staring at something.

“This is after a decade’s worth of tinkering, apparently. Took the original team years just to get anything past the wash.” She’s counting, a distant look tracking across the displays. “There. See that?”

I have to squint. It’s one tiny spot on a backdrop of fire. “What is it?”

“The Fisher King.”

I frown at her.

“That mark is the biggest piece of solid ground that we know of. Surveyors say it’s ten, fifteen times the size of Horizon.”