The compound eyes found him.
Not gradually — not with the incremental, building quality of a search converging on a location through accumulated evidence. The transition from scanning to locked was immediate and total, the thousand-faceted organs completing their sweep and arriving at his position with the specific, absolute quality of instruments that had been built for exactly this task and had performed it exactly as designed.....
The passive concealment that had served him across the inner region's shadow worm territory — the specific, careful management of presence that had kept him below the threshold of detection through several hours of consecutive danger — failed in the space of a single second.
Not because it had been poorly maintained.
Because the things looking for him had not been built with ordinary concealment in mind as the upper boundary of what they could penetrate.
