The pulse came again before the operator found a place to write it.
She had a board arranged by channel, a printed sequence beside her hand, and enough marks across both that a stranger would have mistaken the corrections for damage. The new signal belonged nowhere. It appeared beneath a closed route, stuttered through two markers, and left a thin line on the instrument where the roster showed only an old maintenance division.
“Don’t assign the nearest name,” Tessa said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I know. Someone on the family line might.”
The operator called the original identifier aloud. Another woman repeated it and asked whether the last mark was a broken character or a separate response. Neither could tell. They recorded both possibilities.
Eli watched from the supported mount. A physical shield separated him from the cracked casing. The absence of defense made the edge of that shield impossible to ignore. His mind kept calculating how far it covered and how much of his body remained outside it, as if careful attention could replace the barrier he had burned.
Juno came beside the operator and traced the route on the old plan.
