The contact was cold enough to feel wet, though Eli’s fingers found no moisture.
He had expected the faint presence to sharpen into a single point when Juno isolated the junction. Instead the room seemed to lose its ordinary depth. The wall remained where his eyes put it. Something beyond his hand drew nearer without crossing the distance, and a patterned pressure moved through the contact like a shape felt through folded cloth.
He did not hear the likely name.
He did not hear any name.
“Contact,” he said.
Juno acknowledged without looking away from the response. The engineer had the local path. The volunteer had the barrier. Mira stood where she could observe both Eli’s hand and the engineer’s lever, while the envoy kept the two forms of the identifier visible to the family representative. All of that arrangement belonged to preparation. Now it let several people keep watching different things while Eli struggled to say what the contact contained.
There was a repeated turn in the impression, a pattern that seemed to fold back through a second relation rather than divide into another source. He recognized the shape of the treaty mapping only because they had spent so long refusing the simpler human label. Recognition did not make the sensation a readable record. It might be his own expectation organizing an ambiguous trace.
