Chapter 22: Desta Names the Thing That Consumed Her Colony

She wrote the date first.

This was methodology. The date grounded the observation in time, which grounded the observer in the chain of cause and effect, which grounded the chain of cause and effect in the assumption that such chains existed and could be followed and that following them led somewhere other than the place you started. She had learned this on day three of the eighteen months, when the only alternative to writing the date was sitting down in Colony Harrow's specific soil and becoming something the breach could use.

The breach was twelve meters away.