Chapter 316: Six Medium Zones
Zone Four was a plains terrain with three distinct stone layers.
The top layer — packed earth and deep sediment, deeper in the lower ground — was standard. Below that: compressed mudflat stone, the kind that formed in old shallow-water periods when the eastern terrain had been wet. Below that: old rock, pre-network, under enough pressure for long enough that it had become something different from what it started as. Dense in a specific way. The carrier function moved through the second layer the way water moves through packed sand — not difficult, but with more resistance side to side than downward.
Kai noted this. Zone Four required a different descent approach.
He made his first contact on the second morning.
Yara was on one knee at the zone's northeast edge, measuring surface growth variations with an instrument the size of a book. She had placed fifteen reference markers in a 200-meter line by the time he surfaced.
