Gu and Yan returned to the control chamber. Wei watched the corridor while Luo remained at the junction. They had one instruction: finish the visual inspection, then retreat.
The room was still low and dusty. Gu knelt beside the response plate’s empty screw mounts. He did not touch them. A small mirror let him see beneath the rail.
“Someone removed a device recently,” he said. “The scratches are fresh.”
The dust formed a clean rectangle under the old grime. Yan compared it with the etched words on the plate. “The relay is gone, but the label is still here.”
“Someone may have wanted us to know what the chamber does,” Gu replied. “Or they may not have cared whether we found it.”
Yan looked at the pressure lines on the floor. The broken emitter remained dark, but a faint pulse traveled around it toward the central wall.
“It rerouted,” he said. “The line goes around the broken point.”
“Could that be automatic?”
