Juno arrived after midnight with a broken housing in her lap and a fury too tired to spend.
The slower equipment movement had taken its own checked route, with its own handoff and a council custodian who refused to hurry the final inventory because people above ground were impatient. At the boundary an examiner had opened the damaged casing, found the listed cracked fittings, and lost interest when Juno demanded that he distinguish old damage from anything his tools caused. The authorized signature copy had remained behind an inner lining, where its concealment had been recorded separately under the council’s terms.
Now the custodian watched her remove it over a clean cloth in the bakery storeroom. Sera compared the seal marks with the return message from the gate. Ilyan checked the narrow record against the description he had carried. Only when all three agreed did Juno let herself lean back.
“The heavy case is received,” she said. “Not the complete sequence. Not the originals. If somebody writes that we brought an entire reservoir archive up in a broken box, I will throw the box at them.”
Eli moved a chair into reach. “Sit first.”
“I am sitting.”
She was, technically, on the edge of a flour bin. He left the chair anyway.
