Eshel followed the bridge’s hidden path through the maintenance records that night, at the yard bench, under the work lamp, and found where it ended.
He did it as he did everything: slowly, reading every entry, checking each one twice. The forge’s remote command log, which Cant had let him copy under clause nine, showed every order that came down the route into Hearth. The bridge drew on the heart steadily, through its channel. And where the bridge’s draw went, the log recorded a destination. It was neither a lamp nor a district. It was a node in the maintenance network, a station the bridge fed.
The node had no public designation. It was not on the Directorate’s chart or the Compact’s. It existed only in the maintenance records, as a string of characters at the end of the bridge’s route.
“I can trace it,” Eshel said. “Through the registry. The maintenance registry. Every node on the network has a registry entry, even the ones not on the public chart. It has to, or the orders couldn’t find it.” He worked his slate. “Here. The node’s physical location. It’s not on Cinder. It’s beyond the moon. Past Cinder’s moon, in the dark side’s shadow. A station.”
