Sera photographed the marker before she touched the next step.
The cut strokes held dust along their upper edges. A newer scrape crossed the lowest line, pale against the dark stone, but the sign itself had not been made for the facility. Its shape matched one on the coastal drawing copy she carried: a divided circle and a narrow downward stroke, arranged beside a repeated boundary figure.
Matched in shape. She wrote that qualification before anything else.
A familiar mark could mean a related community, an old trade route, a warning copied by strangers. It could not identify the people below or tell her what they would think of an armed hunter appearing on their stairs. The first coastal encounters had cost enough to teach that distinction. She would not make the cavern pay for her relief at seeing something she recognized.
She took a second photograph with the edge of her notebook in the frame for scale. Then she drew the mark herself. Cameras could fail, batteries could die, and a runner carrying a page could show a team where to stop without needing a screen.
Behind her, the machine bay held its cooling silence. A panel still gave off a little heat when she brought the back of her hand near it. Farther along, the temperature had fallen to the stone’s chill. Something large had been drawing power here and was not drawing it in the same way now. That was useful to Juno. It did not tell…
