The echo answered the consent question with a fragment it had already used.
“Final wish freely entrusted. Privilege bound to giving.”
Then it repeated a phrase about maintenance and stopped before the part that might have explained what the maintenance sustained. The pause was long enough for Eli to begin expecting another sentence. None came.
Juno read the question back for the observer. She had asked about the origin condition of the Heir of the Fallen privilege, not whether every current System operation required consent. Those were different questions, and the old mechanism had only supplied a damaged answer to the first.
“Ask the wider question,” Eli said.
She did.
The echo returned to local purchase and distributed bearing. Its anchor description had intruded again. Juno waited, repeated the question once within the prepared protocol, and received the same broken sequence. She recorded that it had not answered reliably.
It was strangely easy to feel offended by the failure, as though a living witness had refused the most important part. Ilyan asked the group to remember that a preserved response could fail without deciding to deceive them. The old account had an apparent scope and a damaged capacity. Neither frustration nor urgency could make it testify beyond those limits.
