The residential bridges gave way to wider platforms as they entered the central district, the architecture shifting from lived-in wood and hanging lanterns to something heavier, built from stone and woodwork that predated the rest of Ukai by years . The buildings here were fewer and larger, their walls thick, their windows narrow. Official structures - the kind that existed to contain important things and discourage people from getting too close to them.
The Echelon hall sat at the district's centre, visible through the gaps between trunks as they moved along a parallel walkway. Raizen had seen it during the day - the large central structure with its curved roof, the platforms extending from either side, the wide entrance flanked by guards.
Saffi noticed it first.
"The ground around the hall," she said. Her voice was low, barely above a whisper, barely enough for the distance between her mouth and Raizen's ear. "Look at it."
Raizen looked around. The walkways and platforms surrounding the hall were dry. Completely dry - no puddles, no residual moisture, no darkened wood from the drizzle that had been falling intermittently all day. The clouds were glowing, yes – but the rain never stopped falling. The rain had been touching everything else in Ukai, collecting in grooves, beading on railings, darkening every single exposed surface. But around the hall, in a rough circle extending maybe fifty meters or so from the building's walls, the wood was pale and dry as if the rain had simply decided not to fall there.
Raizen remembered it. The Eon barrier. The anti-rain field that the Echelon mantained – the pretty dome of channeled Eon, the distorsion in the air that deflected every single raindrop from the hall's perimeter. It had been running all day. Maybe longer. The dry circle was clean - the boundary between wet and dry as sharp as a line drawn with a ruler.
"It's been up continuously," Saffi said. "Not cycling, not intermittent. Full coverage, all day."
That was unusual. Running an Eon barrier constantly required significant output, and the risk of stirring discussions or perturbation for the civilians was pretty high, especially now, with the clouds. During the day, when the hall was active and occupied, the barrier made sense - protect documents, protect equipment, keep the interior dry. But at night, with the hall closed and everyone gone, maintaining it was an expense that implied something inside was valuable enough to justify the cost and effort.
Or something inside was sensitive enough to be damaged by literally anything.
Raizen pulled back from the railing and led them further along the parallel walkway, keeping the hall in peripheral view. They reached a point where an older trunk rose between the walkway and the hall's perimeter - one of the massive ancient ones, its bark ridged and thick, its branches extending outward in a canopy that overlapped with the hall's roof.
"We should probably climb," Raizen said. "Get a look from above before we do anything."
Saffi assessed the trunk. Tested the bark with her fingers - firm, dry on this side where the barrier's edge met the natural moisture half. She found a foothold, then another, and began pulling herself up quietly, visibly struggling at every step.
Raizen followed, his mouth tilted. He knew Saffi wasn't made for this. He knew she probably didn't want to. But she kept going, not caring about anything. It kind of looked like him.
He wanted to tell her to get down. He wanted to let her to leave him complete the mission alone.
But deep down he doubted himself.
The bark was rough under his palms, the ridges deep enough to grip but spaced irregularly, each handhold requiring a split-second assessment before committing weight to it. They started climbing in silence, the only sounds their breathing and the faint scrape of boots on wood, moving upward through the branches until the canopy thinned and the hall's roof appeared below them, its curved surface pale under the dim cloud glow.
They found a thick limb that extended over the hall's western wall - wide enough to crouch on, high enough to see the entire compound without being visible from the ground. Raizen settled his weight against the branch and looked down.
The wide section where he stood with Hikari was right below them. If he jumped three meters and something, he could peek inside the hall, through the transparent window.
The ledge was still there – the one he gripped, the one that cut his hand, and whose wound Hikari struggled to heal.
Raizen looked at his hand. There still was the faintest pink line, but the wound was completely healed.
The hall's curved roof spread below them. The entrance on the back side was visible through a gap in the foliage - two heavy doors, carved wood, flanked by stone pillars. On the other side of this entrance, the main walkway stretched southward into the central district. And behind the building, extending from the northern wall, the wide platform where the aircraft sat.
It was there. The same vehicle from the scouting mission - dark, smooth-hulled, its surface reflecting the cloud glow in dull sheets of muted white. It hovered, attached to the platform's edge, engines mostly silent, producing no vibration that Raizen could detect from this distance. Twenty meters long, maybe ten wide, with no visible markings or insignia. The kind of vehicle that existed to carry things without being noticed, and succeeded at both.
The cargo door – a curved piece of solid steel – was open. A wide rectangle of really dim red light spilled from the interior onto the platform's surface, and in that light, Raizen could see crates - stacked near the aircraft's loading ramp, some inside the vehicle, waiting in the back side in neat rows.
The lizard shifted in Raizen's pocket.
Raizen felt it move - the small body uncurling, the head rising above the fabric's edge. But the movement was different from the lizard's usual adjustments. Slower. More cautious. The tiny head emerged and turned toward the hall below, and the pale gold eyes narrowed.
It didn't speak immediately. For a few seconds, it just looked - sweeping its gaze across the hall's roof, the platform, the aircraft, the dry perimeter where the barrier held the rain at bay. The spikes on its head rose halfway and held there, not fully raised, not fully flat either. An in-between position Raizen hadn't seen before.
"Something very dark has been here," the lizard mumbled.
"Veeery funny" Raizen muttered, ready to close the shirt's pocket.
"Nononono, wait!" The lizard shouted, fighting against Raizen's closing thumb. "I'm serious. There's something really bad in here."
"This is the Echelon, do you even know what you're talking about!?" Saffi hissed.
"I have no idea, miss, but if they're messin with stuff like this, they should at least go outside"
Raizen shushed the lizard. "And when does your smartness think that this "dark thing" was here?"
The lizard opened its tiny mouth, then closed it, then opened again and spoke. Its voice was quieter than ever. No comedy, no theatrical delivery.
"Recently. And it's still very close."
The pale eyes stayed fixed on the hall below. The spikes didn't lower.
