Chapter 27: Inside the Purity Ledger's Rewrite Cycle

The nodes were not labelled. Brennan had told him this twice — had said it with the particular emphasis of a man who had made the same point to himself many times before arriving at the meeting and still did not trust that he had made it clearly enough. The nodes are not labelled. They are structural. You will feel them before you see them.

Elias moved along the left side of the wall and pressed his palm flat against the inscription surface.

The sensation was not painful. It was specific — a pressure behind the skin that was not pressure, a resistance without mass, the way cold water feels when you first submerge your hand and the hand does not yet know it is cold. Beneath his palm the inscription cycled: a name forming, dissolving, replaced by another name with different numbers beside it. The light it produced came up through his fingers. He moved his hand eighteen inches to the left and the resistance shifted.