The fragment pointer led them out of clean House traffic into a band of ended route territory which official maps called exhausted.
It did not look exhausted. Lanes were thin and pale, yes, but kept a quiet pressure, old endings which had not totally agreed to stay dead. Tohu kept residual thresholds tight. Jehovah's supervision followed at a distance which suggested this approach was allowed once, and would not be romanticized. Sera had no observers left to send. That absence made the approach cleaner and stranger at the same time.
The intermediary waited in a hollow station made from closed judgment arches. It was tall and grey white, neither armored nor crowned, with continuity script slowly passing under its skin like rivers beneath ice. Not the source, a servant of the pattern. When the nine entered it turned as if it had been counting their steps for a very long time.
