The delayed anchor answered after Juno had begun counting the closing interval.
Its short report came through the independent relay on the lower route. A runner read the source time, the local contribution, and the regulator’s failure to settle. The anchor had not stopped. It had not reached the response the closing sequence required either.
Juno put her pencil across the next step.
“Hold here,” she told the local operator.
The woman held. Across the instruments, the replacement boundary remained open at a controlled gap while the intelligence pressed against the old prison’s disconnected paths. The harvesting branches lay isolated. There was no captive current to call upon if a new anchor responded too slowly. That absence was the condition of the work, not a reserve waiting for someone frightened enough to use it.
Juno checked the delayed site’s earlier readings. This was not the overheated shared line that had been relieved by reducing a gate defense. Another regulator, another local problem. The plan had assigned backup capacity for a delayed closing response, within a stated interval. She needed to know whether that capacity still existed after everything else the sites had done.
She sent the request through the relay.
