The first conscious use of his Gift occurred on the seventeenth day in the worst possible circumstances.
They were lost.
The logic of the seventeenth day had begun normally passable terrain, clear direction, an acceptable progression rate for eighteen people including four children under ten. The sun was visible through the clouds in the general east-southeast direction, precise enough to orient by.
Then the second weekly Draw had arrived at midnight and the terrain had changed, and they had needed to detour around a new body of water that had appeared to their east, and the detour had taken two hours longer than expected, and after those two hours the direction of the sun and the direction they were walking no longer matched.
They had been walking north for at least three hours.
Vael had noticed gradually and told Marek at the tenth hour.
The terrain around them was an old 2247 residential suburb a maze of knee-height concrete and brick low walls, foundation slabs, vegetation masses that blocked any view beyond twenty meters in any direction. No vertical landmarks. The sun gone behind complete cloud cover for two hours.
And the second weekly Draw had changed the vegetation masses around them, closing passages that had been open that morning and opening spaces that hadn't existed before.
Vael stopped.
The caravan stopped with him.
He closed his eyes.
He searched for the mental movement.
Not the complete superimposition he knew from four nights of unsuccessful attempts that he couldn't produce that at will, not yet, perhaps not for a long time. He searched for something smaller. More partial. The edge of something he had touched during Draws and grazed during his nightly attempts.
He tried to read what the terrain around him was telling him.
Not to see the layers to read the traces. The Draw's scars in the ground. The directions from which vegetation masses had been displaced. The way fractured concrete walls showed the angle of the force that had fractured them. Every element of the terrain carried the history of its movement if you knew how to look.
He opened his eyes and looked.
And this time, he saw something.
Not transparent layers. Traces. Directions. The terrain around him spoke of its history if he listened with the right attention the fractures in the low walls told him where the pressure of the last Draw had come from, the direction of flattened vegetation masses told him which way they had moved, the relative position of heavy objects gave him a partial map of the previous configuration.
He built the previous version of the terrain mentally from these fragments.
It wasn't perfect. It wasn't complete. But it was enough to identify a reference point the location of an open space in the pre-Draw terrain that, if the local logic was consistent, should correspond to something in the current terrain.
"This way", he said.
He indicated a direction through a dense vegetation mass.
Marek looked at him. "Are you sure?"
Vael thought about the honest way to answer that.
"No. But it's the best available information."
Marek looked at the dense vegetation mass. Looked at the still-overcast sky. Looked at the eighteen people waiting in the cold.
"Go as scout. Twenty minutes."
Vael entered the vegetation mass.
The vegetation was denser than expected woody stems two centimeters in diameter packed thirty centimeters apart, interlaced lateral branches, everything wet from the two previous days' rain and cold against his hands and face as he forced his way through, ducking, twisting, pushing entire sections aside.
At fifteen meters, something moved to his right.
He froze.
The movement was in the stems three meters away a displacement moving parallel to his direction of progress. Slow. Regular. Not the random movement of an animal disturbed by his passing. A movement that was following.
He waited.
The displacement stopped.
He waited more.
It resumed, slightly closer two meters, two and a half.
He drew his knife. He kept moving.
The displacement continued in parallel.
At twenty-two meters, he emerged on the other side.
Before him, an old suburb street concrete slabs under sparse ground cover, open space, and on the horizon in the southeast direction, a break in the clouds letting through a column of grey light.
Not the sun directly. The sun's direction.
He turned to go back to the group.
The displacement converged immediately.
He heard it stems opening from the right, a movement that no longer bothered staying parallel. He pivoted right and brought the knife forward and the Shred came out of the vegetation at one and a half meters.
In the vegetation's half-light, its form was even less defined than usual its outlines blended into the surrounding organic darkness with an efficiency that made its edges difficult to perceive. What Vael saw clearly was the direction and speed of approach.
He had no room to back up. The stems behind him blocked.
He stepped forward.
One controlled step toward the thing, knife first. The principle he had taught himself at twelve and repeated enough times that his body executed it without conscious thought in a confined space, retreating is losing, moving toward the thing is the only way to control the contact point.
The blade entered the Shred's mass.
The Resin did its work fragmentation at the contact point, accelerated decomposition spreading outward, the cracking glass sound. The thing convulsed around the knife with a force that traveled up through his wrist. He maintained the pressure, stepping forward once more to keep contact.
Six seconds. Seven. Eight.
The Shred dissolved.
Vael withdrew the knife. He looked at his hands. They weren't trembling this time.
He recoated the blade with Resin from the container at his belt and went back toward the group.
They crossed the vegetation mass in column.
On the other side, the break in the clouds was still there the direction of the sun, clear and usable. Marek looked at the direction. Looked at Vael. Said nothing for a moment.
"How did you know it was this way?"
Vael thought about the honest way to answer.
"The traces the Draw leaves", he said. "The terrain carries the history of what it was. If you read it correctly it says something about where you are."
Marek was silent for a moment.
"That's your Gift."
It wasn't a question. Vael didn't answer as if it were.
"Maybe", he said.
Marek nodded once the gesture of someone integrating information into an existing category and moving on.
"Point", he said.
Vael took his position at the head of the column.
In his pocket, the fabric with the symbols. In his head, the map under construction and its layers.
In his chest, something very small that resembled a door opened slightly onto something he hadn't yet fully seen.
He was walking toward the sun.
The next Draw was in five days.