Mira did not say that the console belonged to the Hollow King.
She put her sketch on the table where Eli could see it and pointed to the mark she had recognized. The curved line, the two adjacent strokes, the placement beside a recessed panel: those were the features she could compare. The damaged chamber in her memory had contained other shapes she could not now recover clearly enough to draw.
“In that future, it was near machinery holding dead minds while a breach was sealed,” she said. “I don’t know whether this is the same device.”
Juno looked at the console without touching the controls. Its maintenance indicators remained in their ordinary observed state. Pela called for a local operator who knew the active connection rather than treating familiarity with an inscription as operating authority.
Eli stood beside Mira, leaving room between them and the recessed panel.
“What do you remember seeing?” he asked. “And what are you afraid it means?”
She looked at him sharply. The question was intimate without asking for trust she did not owe him. He had wanted her memories to explain him before. He was trying now to give the image and the accusation separate places to stand.
