The engineer did not agree with Juno’s first estimate of the warning time.
She put a finger beside the interval and said she had spoken after the second adjustment, not before it. Juno turned the display back to the raw sequence. The engineer’s own clock had been checked against a different reference, and their initial alignment had carried a small offset. The difference did not move the warning to a different phase of the operation. It still mattered.
“Show me where you heard the instruction,” Juno said.
The engineer identified the saved segment in her log and then listened while the council observer played it once. She did not need to hear it repeatedly. Rook had said to continue while seeking a restriction. The apparatus had kept drawing after her stated objection that the range had been exceeded.
Juno shifted the estimate and widened the uncertainty where the two clocks could not be aligned more closely. The engineer read the revised line before nodding.
“That’s what I can support.”
They sat on opposite sides of the worktable, guild equipment beside a council reader, neither source treated as complete because it belonged to the more trusted person. The engineer’s clothes still smelled faintly of hot metal. A bandage covered the place where the chamber support had scraped her arm during withdrawal. Tessa had checked it before the session and assigned a break that Juno could not extend merely because they were finally making progress.
