He went in the following morning.
Zhao Yuexin was at the eastern path as she had been every morning since the first day. He told her where he was going before she could lead him toward the middle zone boundary. She looked at him for a long moment without saying anything. Then she walked with him to the deep zone boundary instead of the middle zone's.
At the boundary line, she stopped.
The pressure differential was more pronounced up close than it had been from a distance. Not hostile. Present. The specific quality of a space that had developed its own awareness over a long enough period that it expressed that awareness as an environmental characteristic rather than as any individual entity's output.
"I won't follow you in," she said. "If you are not back by nightfall I will assume you need retrieval," she said. "I will not assume you are dead until I have evidence."
"That's a harsh way to frame everything, but still understandable."
