Juno put the instrument trace beside Sera’s first junction note and asked her to ignore the largest shape on the worker’s map.
“Start here. The turn we know.”
The clear case lay flat under a shaded light. Through its cover, Eli could see a dark route dividing around a narrow hatched space. The direct branch looked shorter. On Juno’s street record, that was where a pressure fluctuation had interrupted the stable reading. The detour passed through a wider sequence of turns she had not yet inspected.
The correspondence was useful precisely because it was local. Juno showed the Aegis engineer the two fixed features that made her comparison possible and the third that did not line up cleanly. The engineer moved the light to eliminate a reflection. The uncertain feature remained uncertain.
“Could be a level change,” he said.
“Could be. It could also mean our orientation is wrong farther along.”
Sera used the pole to indicate the next reachable junction on the ordinary route sheet. She would verify it before anyone brought the medical load. The map avoided several corridors that already looked unstable in their own records, which suggested its maker knew something they did not. It said nothing about what the same corridors were doing now.
