The chamber’s floor retained the square marks of an older arrangement.
Eli could see where a workbench had stood, where a machine had shaken its feet into the concrete, where someone had repainted an aisle around a column. The pale curved wall crossed all three without respecting any of them. It rose from the floor as smoothly as ice forming in a bowl.
Bram held the plans flat beneath the lamp.
“Not a conversion,” he said. “There should be two separate rooms here.”
Juno kept her instrument at the threshold. The draw had not vanished when they disconnected the powered anchor. It pulsed through the wider chamber in shallow intervals, making the light along the old aisle look almost alive. Eli watched one pulse fade before moving his next foot.
Kellan fastened the return line to a sound bracket in the maintenance doorway. Sera marked the doorway itself with cloth, then added a chalk arrow on the low wall beside it. The line lay loose enough to follow without dragging on the attachments. Nobody trusted a painted aisle that ran straight into a wall.
The chief’s guard came around the side route with a second plan sheet.
“Last survey,” he said. “I found the copy in the booth. Signed by Dera Voss.”
