Juno spent the first hour repairing a fault that had nothing to do with Eli.
The archive’s workbench rocked when someone leaned against its left corner. A wedge had been driven beneath the wrong foot, forcing a split farther up the wood. Before she would set the monitor down, Juno asked the technician to help her unload the lower shelf and fix the support. Mira watched them with her arms folded. The reservoir readings were worsening while they argued with furniture.
“If the bench moves,” Juno said without looking up, “we won’t know whether the lead moved with it.”
The technician pulled the old wedge free. She worked for the archive, knew where its reliable light came from, and had no reason to conceal a flaw in Juno’s equipment for friendship’s sake. She asked for the complete circuit drawing before anyone asked her to observe Eli.
Juno gave it to her. The technician found two annotations that referred to an earlier sensor and made her cross them out. The correction was small enough that Eli might once have resented the delay. He had learned how much false confidence could fit inside a small copied error.
He carried the narrower offer to the guardian when the bench stood level.
