The borrowed bench supply arrived with a note saying it had to be returned by the next morning.
Juno read the note before she opened the packing case. The workshop that owned it had repairs waiting, and an investigation was not a reason to make their customers wait indefinitely. She put the return time beside the test plan and crossed out the second speculative sequence she had hoped to run if the first proved interesting.
The technician sent with it had not worked at the river. His name was Pellan, and he asked to see the recovered files before hearing Juno’s explanation of what they meant.
“You can tell me your theory after I know what the data actually contain,” he said.
She liked him less immediately and trusted the work a little more.
The trace had a slower feature beneath the violent rise associated with the opening. Juno had called it apparent counterflow in her working notes, then underlined apparent after remembering how the sensor mount had shifted under heat. It resembled something in the Tower filament records without matching cleanly enough to make resemblance a conclusion.
Pellan connected the independent supply to the reader through checked limits. The burned core remained isolated and out of the circuit. This was replay of recorded data, not a new field test and certainly not an attempt to revive the barrier.
