Chapter 5: Desta Counts the Cost of Colony Harrow

The soil remembered her boots.

Desta noticed it the way she noticed most things now — catalogued, filed, set aside for later processing. The ground at Colony Harrow's perimeter had a particular give to it, a slight pneumatic yielding underfoot, as though something beneath the surface was aware of pressure and chose to respond. She had walked on soil that did not do this. She had walked on soil that did not do this for three years, in four different cities, in the deliberately ordinary life she had constructed from the wreckage of the extraordinary one, and she had come to rely on the absolute indifference of normal earth. The way it simply held you up. The way it did not notice.

Colony Harrow's earth noticed.