"Come on," he said. "We're almost there."
The platform was different from anything else in Ukai.
Steel-plated, reinforced, bolted to a cluster of trunks at the city's eastern edge with industrial brackets that looked imported rather than grown. The surface was flat and hard underfoot - no wood grain, no bark texture, no sign that a tree had been involved in the construction beyond the biological columns that held it aloft. It looked like a piece of a different world had been attached to Ukai's canopy, a metal island in a wooden sea.
