The morning of Day 153 rose over the eastern foothills with the pale, clear amber of late autumn. Frost silvered the split-rail fences around Joric Thane’s outer caravan shelter. But inside the weigh-beam office, the iron potbelly stove crackled with dried pine knots. It filled the room with the dry scent of pitch and warm slate.
Kezra Venn sat on a low wooden bench near the window, her boots resting flat on the scrubbed floorboards. Her fingers didn’t twitch against her thighs. The violent, shuddering tremors that had racked her nerves after the Horizon shifted weight on Day 145 had subsided into a deep, quiet fatigue that felt less like an injury and more like the earned tiredness of a long harvest. Buttoned securely inside her canvas coat, the waxed leather cover of her survey notebook rested silent against her ribs. Thirteen days still remained on the twenty-one-day Horizon lock. The rag-paper pages within were dormant, inert, and heavy with the record of forty-four completed circuits. But she felt no urge to unbuckle the brass clasp or test the margins. For the first time in five months, she was content to sit in a room without calculating the distance between the floor beams.
