Mira stopped at the observation rail and waited for the technician to secure the return cable. The inner gate filled the space ahead without looking like a door. Its overlapping surfaces caught the work lamps in narrow planes. Some remained dark and smooth. Along the maintenance seam, a pale line kept brightening beneath a film that had begun to curl.
She had remembered a larger fracture.
That memory had troubled her on the descent. She had expected a broad failure across the left support, the kind that made even an untrained observer step back. Here the left support still held its shape. The weakness had gathered around a smaller seam behind the old service access, where a hand could scarcely fit between the casing and the wall.
The technician checked her meter against the fixed reference point. “You’re looking too far left.”
“I know.”
“Your earlier warning?”
“It gave us a place to look. It didn’t give us this.”
Mira made herself turn fully toward the damaged seam. The past had never been a second instrument she could lay beside the present. It supplied terrors with excellent detail and terrible authority. She had acted before as if enough conviction could turn that authority into certainty. People had paid for the difference.
