At the second hour after midnight, the water in the water tank began to speak.
It wasn’t a sound that entered through the ears. It began as a rhythmic, deep-seated shaking in the soles of Qiao Ming’s bare feet as he walked the outer edge of the circular marble basin. The polished white stone, warm and dry since their arrival, seemed to pulse with a low, high-pressure murmur, as though a huge lung were drawing breath sixty arm-lengths beneath the floor. Each step he took sent tiny prickles of deep ring through his calf muscles, shaking the horn-hard calluses of his heels.
Qiao Ming halted three paces from the golden rim of the Genesis Well.
The surface of the black silt-ink, which had rested motionless during his afternoon soundings, was no longer flat. It had begun to heave in slow, nested swells that rose and fell without breaking into spray. Each swell traveled from the outer red stone curb toward the central hovering sphere of starlight, disappearing into the glowing core with a soft, sucking sigh that echoed through the round hall like silk dragged across wool.
Yan Zhiqiu walked down the seven marble steps, her Broken Slate held securely before her chest. The fractured dark rock was glowing. Along the jagged line of its ancient fracture, a thin seam of emerald light was pulsing in exact synchrony with the swell in the well. Her boots clicked sharply on the dry marble, the sound crisp and solitary in the vast…
