While the coalition rested and repaired their lines on Level Five, the hunter was navigating the altered geography of Rookvale on foot, learning the physical costs of an uncoupled province.
Because River, Orchard, and Salt had been cut from the anchor network, the underground emergence routes that had once allowed the double to travel across the valley in seconds were dead. The unlit cable trenches were cold. The telegraph wires had been chopped into scrap. And the copper light shape of the new sentry posts barred every major intersection.
The creature moved through the abandoned drainage cuts of the central rail-yard. Its boots stepped silently through freezing mud and coal sludge. With Burdenless Step, it moved without the heavy slosh of living feet. But its gray courier coat was soaked through with sulfur drizzle, the wool heavy and clinging to its shoulders.
The double was not a ghost. It was a physical organism blended from Len’s Level 5 baseline. It felt the freezing wind. It felt the drag of wet cloth. And it felt the dull, throbbing ache of the blisters forming on its heels from eighteen hours of nonstop overland transit.
At the junction of the old coal siding and the Tram approach, the hunter paused in the shadow of an overturned ballast car. It reached out its left hand, laying its index finger against an iron rail. Not an energized telegraph wire, but a plain, dead iron rail running toward the tram shed.
