The scout who had not opened the far door said so before Sera finished drawing his route.
“The passage held up to it,” he said. “The hinge side was hidden. We didn’t force it.”
Sera stopped the ink at the door instead of joining it to the line on the old plan. The break left the shortest route looking incomplete. Eli found himself grateful to the scout for making the incompleteness difficult to ignore.
They met in a store room lent by the protected site. Outside, the summit’s last transport was departing. Inside, three maps shared one table, and the equipment for an independent descent occupied more floor than any of them wanted to admit.
The shortest route passed active quest infrastructure. Its approach was familiar in fragments: a wall Eli had seen under different circumstances, a junction Mira could describe from the earlier future, and a chamber identified by the present scouts. Those recognitions did not make the unseen sections continuous.
“Show what you walked,” Sera told the second scout. “Then tell us what the old plan suggests.”
He traced the confirmed ground with a blunt pointer. At one turn he had seen recent scuffing and disturbed dust. He could not identify who or what had passed. The marks did not establish a living repair crew, an enemy patrol, or a safe path simply because someone had used it.
