Mira waited until the final witness group disappeared beneath the unfinished passage’s low opening. A resident took the outer lamp down, removing a point the hunters could use to judge the turn. Beyond the boundary, the leader called another warning. Mira gave her no answer that could be mistaken for permission to enter.
She had delayed them with a shifted loading board, a demand to inspect the route before armed entry, and the simple inconvenience of refusing to leave the narrow place they wanted to occupy. None of it would hold indefinitely. She did not want an exchange of attacks here. People behind her were still passing beneath braces Eli and the local crew had barely made adequate.
The messenger who had brought the guardian’s movement warning waited near the side corridor. He had been sent to keep the settlement from mistaking the protected transport for another unknown party. He had not been sent to bring Mira to it. When she asked which passage, he told her only enough to avoid a collision with the evacuation.
It was enough.
Mira took the service turn after the witness group’s last carrier was inside. She knew what Eli would say if he stood in her way. He would name the guardian’s refusal, the stolen authority inside urgency, the one release that had changed a connection without collapsing the whole reservoir. He would be right about each fact. She could still see the upstream deterioration in the readings that had come before his…
