Eli approached the Aegis leader along the strip Kellan had checked. He stopped outside the cloth where the lifting fittings were laid, giving the workers room to move their hands. Behind the leader, the core rose from its cradle of stone like a dark weight the chamber had grown around.
“You believe taking it out will stop another wave,” Eli said.
“I believe leaving a dangerous core uncontained is not a neutral choice.”
“Neither is breaking its connections.”
The leader glanced toward Juno. “She has not established what those connections do.”
“No. We have the summit pulses and the measurements here. Enough to ask whether the core supports something beyond this room.”
“Enough to ask. Not enough to abandon recovery.”
Eli had brought the shared board rather than relying on the memory of their earlier arguments. He set it where the leader and his engineer could read the recorded times: simultaneous pulses observed at the summit, changes associated with active abilities in the gate, the fractured door and the missing chamber interval. Each item had its limitation. Temporal association did not reveal the full chain between distant structures. The door had received ordinary force as well as an ability-assisted pull. The recorder gap could not be used as a measured spike.
