At eight thousand feet, the world began to skip frames.
Lin Tao stopped on a wide terrace of frost-bitten granite, his left boot suspended half an inch above the stone. He didn’t lower his foot right away. Through his augmented left eye, he observed the horizon where the dark sapphire sky met the blinding white plains of the cloud sea below.
Every twenty-four fractions of a second, the horizon line twitched.
It wasn’t a sight illusion born of height sickness or hypoxia. The sharp-angled boundary of the dark rock ridgeline didn’t blur. Rather, it hopped three tiny fractions of an inch to the left, held for the duration of a single tick. Then he snapped back into its baseline spatial register. To a traditional fighter, the phenomenon would have felt like a sudden tremor in their sea of mind. A fleeting moment of spiritual dizziness easily blamed on the thin mountain air.
To Lin Tao, it was a test red flag.
“Look at the loose shale,” Lin Tao said softly. He gestured toward a heap of black fiery scree piled at the base of the summit crag.
Tie Shan halted behind him, the twelve-pound iron pry-bar resting across his broad shoulder. The giant leaned forward, his heavy brows drawing together as his dark eyes locked onto the mound of broken rock.
