I’m the last to take my turn peering into the cage. When I look at the ball, which is clouded over with a scoring of fine scratches, but still reflective, I don’t see my face. The ball reflects the hills, the landscape behind me, but there is no face staring where mine ought to be. There is no one on the road.

*

The scouts report the lower peters out after only a few hundred yards in heaps of broken glass and rubbery black slag. We take the higher fork.

After not more than forty minutes of climbing, our heads begin to turn and scan into the blank—we’re hearing a sound, the first we haven’t caused in a long while. What is that steady groan?

A metallic odor, sharp like vinegar, is woven in with the fog here. The groan and the scent come out from a crevasse in the seam between two hills. The opening is sheer and narrow, and the chasm shows no bottom. Its sides are smooth, and faceted in narrow vertical strips, all angles with no curves; the surfaces are all unnaturally flat and smooth as pressed steel, the color of glass smoked almost opaque. Light seems to penetrate it a little, to gleam in the edges of the facets, and there is a sullen glow down deep inside, creeping up but without even slightly illuminating the black center of the pit, from which the groaning comes. The sound is like the legend of the mines. One side of the crevasse is higher than the other, and separate stones ranging in size from pebbles to rocks half my size cling inexplicably to the faceted surfaces, as though invisible hands held them there. Silichieh volunteers to clamber down to the crevasse and pry loose one of these hovering rocks, and Makemin turns him down only after a long thought.

We make our way past, and as one man we tend toward the opposite side of the path.

Now there’s grumbling coming from up ahead.

“What now?” the captain asks irritably.

A rockfall—a detail gets busy at once clearing it. I’m not in the detail. Silichieh is poring over the face from which the rocks fell, looking to see if anything interesting is exposed, and I drift past him into the brush for reasons of my own.

Something drags at me—the sensation is impossible to describe—it’s as though hooks have snagged all over the front of my uniform, and a single even strength pulls on them all equally and steadily. Despite myself I stagger with the pull, and now my eyes pick out a seam of bright blue silver in the shade of the stones. I allow myself to draw nearer, leaning back now against the pull.

A piece of lightning lies on the ground where the rock face bares itself out of the soil. It gleams with reflected light: a hair-slender forking line. The clay around it stands out dark and broken, so this must be something the falling rocks exposed.