Eli asked Juno before sending anything to Mira.
The question mattered after the key. A decision about evidence could become another story in which someone had acted for everybody’s protection without asking the person responsible for the work. Juno sat beside the packed reference case, holding the corrected isolation record in one hand. She listened until Eli had finished.
“You think the result will stop her,” she said.
“I think she should have the result.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He looked toward the receiving room. The last evacuees were being settled in temporary spaces accepted for a finite interval. The unfinished passage had closed behind the brace crew. People who had come through it were counting missing bundles, checking injuries, and asking where the next meal would come from. Mira’s theft had not made those consequences disappear.
“I hope it changes her judgment,” he said. “It may convince her the method is too slow. Withholding it won’t make her know less about the reservoir. It makes her choose with one result missing.”
Juno held out the corrected timing sheet. “Then this goes. The failed diagnostic. The uncertain identification. The first design that didn’t handle the surge. Every copy keeps the conditions with it.”
