The pale word stayed on the bottom row of the wall, and Mara kept talking under it.
“I want new measurements,” she said.
She said it to the wall, to the chorus, to whatever part of the many voices was listening. She kept her voice level, the way she read a load sheet aloud at the yard, one figure after another, so nobody could mistake where one ended and the next began.
“Where your sensors are missing, I want gauges. Real ones. Reading real pressure.” She nodded back over her shoulder, toward Eshel, toward the service stair and the yard and the forge far below. “There’s a rack on the bench at the yard. Twelve clamps. My mother’s design, a distributed gauge, small cheap instruments spread out instead of one big one. It’s half set already. Eshel’s setting it.” She paused. “Give us access to the lattice’s cold side, under clause nine, and that rack could be taking readings within days. Days. Not two hundred years.”
Eshel, behind her, said nothing. But she heard his pencil stop.
“And I want an alternate load path,” Mara said. “While the gauges go in. Something to carry Hearth that isn’t the plan you just showed me.”
