Half an hour.
Less than one kilometer.
Lukas looked at the fog ahead — the same fog, the same dark, the same slow coiling patience of ancient atmospheric remnant that had not changed its composition or its character in the slightest since they had started moving — and performed the arithmetic with the specific, flat resignation of someone who knows the result before completing the calculation.
At this rate, the inner region would kill them not through anything as dramatic as a shadow worm encounter. It would simply outlast them — the distance between their current position and any viable exit remaining constant while their reserves declined at one tenth the speed they could be replenished, the gap closing in only one direction until the crossing became impossible.
He looked at Ambrose's figure ahead....
