Along this “channel,” the deadly fog lies lightly and unevenly in a patchwork of lazy puddles and slippery threads that move westward in misty currents. Some of the ground is visible, mostly bizarre stacks of rubble and scattered heaps of bricks, all arrayed more or less in a straight line from the end of the road where they sit. Beyond the gap, where the ground rises as it would if it were the far bank of a big river, the fog again settles so heavily over the land that the land is no longer visible beneath it. Just like everywhere else in the White Sea.

Why is the gap different? Why is it mostly free of Pall?

“It looks like a riverbed that’s run dry, but there’s no road across,” Ao says wearily. “There never was a way across, was there? It always ended here.”

El shakes her head. “I don’t think the roadbed ever ran straight across. Because I think you’re right. I think this was a river. Look at all that rubble.”

Farther out, blocky stacks of bricks rise from the ground like the pillars and piers that hold up old stone bridges, although no bridge she’s ever seen is this long nor the rivers they cross this wide, as far as a man can shoot an arrow. Threads of mist like watery streams trickle along the ground, snaking their way between fallen pillars of stone and scattered islands of brick.

“Look,” says El, pointing across, “see that dark smear there, on the other side? Almost like a pier? There’s a narrow line beyond it, like a lane through the fog. What if that’s where the road starts up again? What if it used to be the other side of a bridge, where the bridge comes down to the shore to meet it?”

“What difference does that make to us since we can’t reach it? We can’t walk through the White Sea.”

“Why does the White Sea not fully cover this channel like it covers all the rest of the land? Why can we see patches of ground? Why doesn’t the fog engulf all of the stone and even some of the heaps of bricks? What if the stone is the same stone that the road is built of?”

Ao sits up straight, searching the scene as she thinks it over. She says slowly, “In the summer, when it’s really hot and there hasn’t been rain, some streams run dry. But there’s still water beneath the mud, isn’t there? What if…” She presses both her hands to her face, squeezes her eyes shut as she thinks, and then lowers her hands. “What if this is a summer channel? It has been hot and dry this year. Spore hates water. What if the mist doesn’t want to touch the muddy parts, the wetter parts?”

Spore hates water. And it can’t touch the road.