Juno began by trying to prove the fault was hers.
She brought the recovered reference to the independent instrument the local engineer had borrowed from another repair room. The owner came with it and remained while it was used. He had not offered the device as an endorsement of the experiment. He wanted the connections checked before his apparatus was put back into service, and he wanted the comparison recorded under the conditions he had actually witnessed.
Eli helped carry a stool into the narrow space beside the bench. His clothes from the retrieval had dried stiff at the cuffs. The water marks would wash out eventually. The exposed tunnel could not be washed back into secrecy, and he felt that cost every time someone mentioned needing a result soon.
Juno compared the reference against the independent instrument without connecting either to the live junction. The first set agreed. She changed the comparison range and checked again. A slight difference at the edge made her pause. The owner adjusted a loose external contact on his own device, repeated the control, and restored the expected response.
“Keep the first one,” he said when she reached for a new sheet.
“I am.”
