Juno asked the independent crafter to take the fragment to the other end of the table.
Not out of the room, not away from its custodian. Far enough that she could work through the comparison without hearing the next inference Juno spoke aloud. The crafter looked at the partial diagram, turned it face down, and took the source copy instead.
Eli felt the delay like pressure behind his eyes.
The courier had finished the bread. Their cleaned scrape had begun to ache now that the journey was no longer occupying every sense. Tessa sat beside them with the return instructions. Neither asked Juno to hurry, which somehow made the room harder to bear.
Juno laid the release-trial sequence under a clear weight.
“This identifies the interrupted path,” she said to Eli. “One path. We never established the fate of what left it.”
“I remember.”
“Keep remembering that when we compare it with this.”
