Juno put the burned sensor casing into a shallow tray and asked Lev not to straighten the bent mount.
He had already reached for a tool. He stopped with it above the table.
“I need it to fit the reader,” he said.
“Then we photograph how it doesn’t fit first.”
The shelter workshop had once stored folding chairs. Now it held a borrowed reader, a lamp that hummed whenever the heater switched on and the parts she had expected never to see again after the field failed. The retrieval crew had marked where they found each piece. A twisted length of the output frame remained at the cleared entrance; the memory casing had been separated from the damaged converter and brought back in its own bag.
Lev photographed the mount from both sides. Juno wrote the recovery identifier beside the image number. Her hands were steadier than they had been at the retreat line, which did not mean she trusted her memory of the last seconds any more than she had that night.
“I thought it ran longer,” she said.
“You were watching the contact.”
