Mira placed her palm against the rail and felt the pressure arrive in three uneven blows.
Nothing had crossed the inner gate. She could still see the narrow strip of floor beyond its lower frame, bare except for grit and a broken fitting. The movement belonged to the barrier itself: a gathering brightness that thickened against one side, withdrew, then gathered farther along. From this distance it could have been mistaken for a body turning behind clouded glass.
She did not report a body.
“Pressure concentrating at the upper left return,” she told Juno. “Three changes. The second was strongest. No visible crossing.”
“Does it correspond to a channel?”
Mira checked the route sheet fastened to the rail. “The next scheduled opening passes that return. That’s my interpretation. I haven’t checked the connection from here.”
A smaller tremor moved beneath her feet. She shifted back to the chalk mark indicating the tested observation position. There was a closer point from which she might see more of the frame. It lay beyond the limit they had established for this watch, where an older support had not been inspected under the new pressure.
For a moment she remembered a route that had once been open there. She could almost feel the speed of moving through it, the clean certainty of knowing a place before anyone else did.
