Chapter 20

# Chapter 20

They crossed the heliopause on day sixty-seven, and the Kusanagi shuddered.

Not mechanically—the hull was sound, the drive nominal, the thermal regulation within parameters. The shudder was informational. A change in the density of charged particles striking the forward hull that the ship's instruments registered as a gradient and that Yuki's lattice perception experienced as a threshold: the boundary between the interstellar void and Sol's domain, the outermost shell of the Sun's influence, the electromagnetic fence that marked the territory of home.