The reference stayed still.
Mira watched the bracket rather than the reader, because the engineer had asked her to watch the bracket. A black mark on the stone remained aligned with the narrow edge of the fastening through the measured interval. The floor vibrated beneath her soles. The stand trembled. The reference did not move beyond its allowed range.
“End,” the engineer said.
The recorder called the time. The skeptical woman wrote it down and asked to see the raw result before anyone explained it.
Mira let the engineer put the trace on the sound landing between them.
There was the repeated structure Juno had marked. There was the local relationship measured against the independently calibrated reference. It appeared within the range predicted by the warning. The dangerous outward connection was no longer only an inference made in Eli’s workroom from Mira’s imperfect first reading.
The engineer did not call it a collapse result.
“We have not turned the key,” she said. “We have not reproduced the full effect. The operating state is unstable, and these intervals remain uncertain. But the connection to active contracts is supported here.”
