[ SOURCE LOG — INSTANCE: UNNAMED ]
Record 1,851.
In one hundred and fourteen years of record-keeping, we have logged:
41,002 surface tremors. 7 custodians. 1 Field.
We have never logged a visitor.
We do not have a protocol for this.
We are, we discover, improvising.
The first thing Kai noticed was the sound.
Not sound exactly. The absence of echo.
Every cave he had ever been in — every sealed formation, every deep survey site, every place where rock enclosed air — had returned sound to you. Modified it, compressed it, gave it back changed. That was what enclosed space did. Sound needed somewhere to go and when it couldn't go far enough it came back.
Here, nothing came back.
He said "hello" — not intentionally, not as a greeting, the word just happened the way words sometimes do when the body is startled and the mind hasn't caught up — and the word left his mouth and went somewhere and did not return.
Roan looked at him sideways.
