The truck was Evelyn's idea.
I could put us anywhere on the continent with a tree on it, and she vetoed the whole method inside a minute. Satellites lie about fence lines, and land men don't sell to people who show up on foot out of nowhere in clean shoes, and nine of the parcels on her list had sellers attached.
"Filings and satellites are estimates, Chairman," she said. "I have bought estimates before. This week we buy ground truth."
So on Wednesday morning we left San Angelo in a used half-ton pickup, titled to a subsidiary, with a bench seat, a bad radio, and a week of America ahead of it.
The first gas station was outside of nowhere, red sun behind the pumps. I bought two coffees and four taquitos off the rollers, and ate the first one leaning on the tailgate while the light came up the road. It was terrible and I liked it enormously.
A hundred years is long enough to miss gas stations, and I had.
Evelyn drank her coffee, watched me, and wrote something in the notebook.
"For the record," she said, in the cab, "I posted the two photographs from Rome on Friday morning. My account, my caption. I said I'd tell you at the next meeting. This is the next meeting."
"I know. You were right to."
She turned on the radio, moved past four music stations without comment, and stopped on a farm report. A man read cattle futures in a flat, patient voice, and Evelyn Kensington settled back into the bench seat and listened to freight move, and for a few miles she looked entirely happy.
Parcel twenty-two sat on the caprock two hours north, a ranch running up against the canyon country. The seam was exactly where the survey put it. The survey called it a fault.
I found it before we ever left the county road. A red-tailed hawk was working the rim, and I borrowed her eyes for a minute from the passenger seat. Through the hawk I had the whole mesa below me, grass and juniper and one dark crease under the rim where the ground never quite warmed. Thin as a held breath.
"Under the rim on the northeast face," I said, and gave the hawk her eyes back. "Sleepy little door. Might be the most boring one on the list."
"Boring," Evelyn said, writing. "The correct condition for a door."
Then we drove down off the rim to buy the ground on top of it.
The seller was waiting at a diner on the square, a rancher named Earl Wills, with a blue heeler that came in with him because nobody in that diner was going to say anything about it. Halfway through the hellos, the dog left Earl's side, crossed under the table, and put his head down on my boot with a sigh, and stayed.
Earl looked at his dog for a while.
"Boss don't like anybody," he said. "Includin' me, some days."
"He's got a good face. How old?"
"Nine." Earl settled into the booth across from us. "So. You're the carbon people."
The company buys grassland and leaves it alone, which is true, and lets the sellers assume the rest. Evelyn took him through it in about four minutes, plain and unhurried, and I mostly ate pecan pie and let her work.
"Two point one," Earl said, at the part of the conversation where that gets said.
"It appraises at one point eight," Evelyn said. "I'll pay the two point one and not insult you, on two conditions I suspect you were going to raise anyway. Say them."
Earl looked at her a long moment.
"Cattle stay through spring. Prices are bad and I'm not takin' a bath on 'em because you people are in a hurry." He tapped the table twice. "And Manuel. Thirty years he's worked that grass. I don't much care what you do with the place, but somebody out there's got to know where the water is, and it ain't gonna be you."
"Grazing rights through May at no cost, and Manuel converts to our payroll at his current wage plus fifteen percent, with the title of land steward, for as long as he wants the work." She was already writing it on a napkin in block letters. "I have done this before, Mr. Wills. The last time it was every driver in a freight company, and it is the only clause I have ever been proud of. Sign the napkin and the lawyers will send the long version this week, and it will say what the napkin says."
Earl read the napkin twice. Then he signed it, and shook her hand, and shook mine, and looked down at his dog on my boot.
"Whatever you are," he told me, "Boss has cleared it, and at my age that's the whole of the checkin' I do."
We finished the caprock survey by late afternoon, and then I drove us off the county road to the tree line, parked in the shade of the oldest shortleaf pine on the slope, and got out long enough to introduce myself to it. Meeting a tree takes a minute, and seeding it takes another. Then I got back behind the wheel, put my left palm flat on the bark through the open window, and asked.
Between one idle of the engine and the next, the pines were white oaks, the light was an hour later, and the air through the vents smelled of river.
Evelyn checked her watch, which is what she does at crossings now. She'd given up on the phone by the third one. The watch was her father's, wound by hand, and it didn't care what continent it was on.
"Nine seconds," she said. Then she looked around the cab, at the dashboard, at the truck that had come with us. "The vehicle crossed. I had assumed the skill carried you, and whatever you could hold. What is the limit of what comes with you?"
"The skill says what I carry, and the trees and I have a generous understanding about the word carry. The most I ever moved at once was a supply column on my sixth world. Forty wagons, the teams pulling them, and every soul walking alongside, out of a fire line and into the next valley."
She had the pen out before I finished the sentence.
"Forty wagons." She wrote it and underlined it once. "I have spent two months building November around ports and airfreight, Chairman. I'm going to need the evening to rebuild it around trees."
"Take the evening. The one constraint is that it only works between trees I've met, which is why I keep introducing myself to forests. Meanwhile, parcel thirty-one. The hollow's a mile down. We'll read it in the morning when the door's at its quietest, and tonight you get the second-best campfire dinner of your life."
"You said second-best."
"You weren't there for it, so this one's the best. I'm flexible on history."
We made camp above the creek and I built the fire and cooked, and Evelyn sat on a log with her coat buttoned to the chin and her notebook shut, which for Evelyn is a full day off.
"Tell me about the garden man," I said, handing her a plate. "The one at the Dartford yard who did nothing but the garden. Everyone quotes your clause and nobody ever says what happened to him. Is he still at it?"
She looked at me for a second.
"Albert. He's eighty-one. The buyer tried to pension him off in year two and my clause cost them a settlement." The corner of her mouth moved, and she caught it, mostly. "There is a rose bed on an industrial estate in Dartford with four lawyers attached to it. He sends me a photograph of it every June."
"Good. That's the best thing I've learned all week, and this week I bought a canyon." I sat down across from her. "Do you miss it? Freight. You listened to that cattle report this morning the same as I listen to my mother's kitchen."
"Every day," she said. "Freight is honest. The truck arrives or it doesn't. I've spent four years in a business where nothing I sold ever arrived anywhere." She looked at the fire. "This job is the first thing since the yard that arrives or doesn't."
The fire cracked. Somewhere down the hollow the creek ran.
"Question fourteen is still on my window," she said. "It's been three weeks, Chairman. You've never left one standing. I'm asking it out loud. One part in ten thousand. State the denominator."
I'd known it was coming since San Angelo. She'd waited until we were two hundred miles from a road, and I couldn't tell if that was kindness or procedure.
"I've only ever seen it written once, and it's on a screen no one else can read. So I'll read it to you.
"Strength, two million six hundred twelve thousand and four. Dexterity, two million four hundred forty-three thousand. Vitality, just under three million. The mind scores run about the same. For scale, the strongest human being I've measured on this world is Rodion, and the same screen calls him a twelve."
She had the notebook open and the pen moving by the second number. By the fourth she stopped writing, and sat with a number she could do nothing with.
"And the last line?"
"Luck. It stopped rendering forty years ago. There's no number in the box anymore."
"Give me the middle of the scale," she said. "Twelve against two point six million is not a ratio, it's a category error. What sits between?"
"Gods. I've met them, Evelyn. Real ones, with temples and weather of their own. The strongest of those read somewhere around half a million, and gods don't fight with their stat line anyway. Vashtor, the demon lord I spent my first ten years on, held most of a world when I got there. He read about a million and a half."
She capped the pen.
"Then read it back with me, Chairman, so I know I'm holding it correctly. You do not age. And the numbers you carry now are higher than anything you fought. Including the things that held worlds."
"Both true. I checked the first week home, on a mountain, alone, because I didn't believe the sheet either."
"What did you find?"
"That the sheet was honest. I throttled one fist technique down to a hundredth of a percent and hit a dead boulder the size of a delivery truck, and the boulder stopped being a boulder. I did not test two percent."
She looked at me across the fire, and her voice didn't change at all when she asked it.
"I want the untested number. If you struck the planet in earnest. What happens?"
"The stats don't rise in a straight line. The higher the number, the more each point does."
"My arithmetic was generous, then."
"Yes. If I set my feet and hit this planet with one real Hundredfold Fist, the crust cracks and doesn't heal. The core takes damage that ends the magnetic field. Without that field the sun strips the air off, and everything alive goes with it."
She did not uncap the pen.
"I'm not guessing, Evelyn. I worked the estimate more than once, because I have to know it."
"The Governor. I have the word from the read-in. I do not have the setting."
"It's not camouflage. It's a ceiling on how much of me reaches the world, it's always on, and it holds everything I've got down to something a room can survive. It's running when I take a step, and when I open a door, and when I pick up my mother."
"What is it set to?"
"Low enough that nothing on this planet has ever measured me. In Rome I opened it to one part in ten thousand for three seconds, and you felt it. The floor sits a long way under that, and it stays there."
"And it never comes off."
"Not here. Not all the way."
She did not say noted.
She was quiet for a long while, and it wasn't her working quiet. I let her have all of it.
"Then by the only definition your worlds ever used," she said at last, "you are a god."
"By that definition, I'm past the ones I've met." I put another branch on the fire. "And there's one line on the sheet I haven't read you yet. An eleventh class. It opened the night I landed on Earth, and it is called the Divine Path."
The creek kept on below us. She didn't reach for the notebook.
"You are not approximately a god," she said. "You are one in progress."
"On the way. It's at Level 2, and it opened with a candle. Whatever it's making me, it's being very patient about the work."
She turned her cup a quarter on the log, and was quiet for a while.
"Withdrawn and answered. Question fourteen closes." She put the notebook away. "For what it's worth, Chairman, I preferred not knowing by less than I expected to."
"For what it's worth, you're the only person alive who's heard those numbers, and I notice I don't mind." I poked the fire. "I've never pulled your sheet. It's rude. Where I've been, reading somebody's numbers uninvited is like opening their mail."
She took the notebook back out and wrote that down.
The hollow read quiet at dawn, the door small and deep and slow, and Evelyn bought the ridge above it before lunch.
Parcel nine was the same afternoon, forty miles east, and it was the widest door on the eastern half of the list.
The filings had it as eleven hundred acres under one name, a man in Little Rock who'd inherited a share and wanted out. Clean survey, no structures shown. We came in off the state road at two and there were four houses on it.
Not cabins. Houses. Mowed yards, a propane tank somebody had painted white, and a woman in her seventies on the second porch watching a truck she didn't know come up her own road.
Her name was Delphine Ward and she had been born in that house.
"Whose road is this?" Evelyn asked her.
"Depends who you ask." Delphine didn't get up. "County says it's Wendell's. Everybody living on it says otherwise. My grandfather bought this ground in 1931 and died without a will, and so did most of his children, and now there's about forty of us on the deed and exactly one of us wants cash."
"Heirs' property," Evelyn said.
"That's the lawyer word."
Evelyn put her hands in her coat pockets and looked at the four roofs for a while.
"Mrs. Ward. If I buy Wendell's share, I can petition a court to sell the whole tract, and I would win, and the four of you would be off this ground inside a year. That is the transaction I was offered on Monday. I would like you to know it was offered."
Delphine looked at her a long time.
"And?"
"And I'm not taking it." Evelyn had the notebook out already, wrote for most of a minute, and tore the page loose. "The first number is what a partition buyer will open at. It is low. The second is a woman in Fayetteville who has beaten three of these. Call her before you sign anything."
While they finished I asked Delphine about the swing set. Two seats, one of them ten years newer than the other. Then about the pecan by the road, which had gone the wrong green on its north side two seasons back. I told her what was under it and what to do about it. She wrote it on the back of Evelyn's page.
In the truck Evelyn shut her door and didn't start the engine.
"Say the part you're not saying," I said.
"Tell me what walking away costs." She was still looking at the four roofs. "Say it in beds."
"Two thousand."
She wrote it down and started the truck.
"Then we're two thousand short and we find them somewhere else," she said, and didn't speak again for thirty miles.
Friday we took the last two Texas parcels off a kitchen table in Sweetwater, and by Saturday we had contracts or handshakes across three states, and one parcel left.
Parcel four sat in the high country of western New Mexico, black timber and old burn scars, the widest seam I'd found in the western half of the country. We came out of an aspen at nine thousand feet into afternoon light, and I knew before Evelyn's boots touched ground that the mountain was wrong.
It was quiet.
Not mountain quiet. Mountain quiet is full. Squirrels arguing, wind working the timber. This was nothing. A mile of good habitat in every direction and not one heartbeat in it bigger than a beetle's.
I reached out for eyes and found none to borrow. Inside a mile of the seam, nothing. At the rim of that mile I found a raven, and slid in behind her eyes, and understood.
She wouldn't look at the basin. She sat a dead snag with her back to the best foraging on the mountain, and every instinct she had was pointed outward, away, and when I nudged her attention toward the seam she left the snag entirely and put another quarter mile behind her.
Animals are afraid of wolves and wildfire. Something under that basin frightened them like that, a mile out in every direction, and not one of them had ever laid eyes on it.
"Stay by the aspen," I told Evelyn, and walked down into the silence alone.
The seam ran along a granite shelf under the oldest of the burn scars, wide as a doorway and dead still. I put my hand flat on the stone above it, the library grip, and listened.
The orchard crack in October had been somebody picking a lock. Quick, clever, gone when I arrived.
This was weight.
Steady, patient, enormous, pressure without rhythm, the whole far side of the seam loaded and still. Nothing prying, nothing working. Just mass, settled against the door from the other side, and staying.
Something was leaning on it.
I don't know how long I knelt there with my hand on the stone. Long enough that the light moved.
When I stood and turned around, Evelyn hadn't stayed by the aspen. She was standing ten feet up the shelf watching me with the notebook already open.
There was nothing for her to feel.
She looked at my face, and wrote down the time.