The support could not be seated from the shelf.
Neri had measured the opening three ways. Each gave her the same answer: the inner foot needed to pass below the lower fold and come up behind the scarred join. Pushing it straight across would place it on the moving surface they were trying to free.
Iven stood beside her, studying the little brass model she held against the mirror’s view.
“I can put it in from below.”
Sera looked at the chamber.
The lower inspection ledge ran beneath their shelf, reached by an old iron ladder bolted into human housing. Beyond its end, the living floor sloped inward toward the branching base of the folds. No human walkway crossed that part.
“You’d need to keep off the tissue,” she said.
“Hang the working cradle from the outer frame. Put the foot in by hand. I can reach its seat from there.”
