Mara stood at the old heart’s frame and looked through the inspection port at the bridge channel.
The port was a small round window of thick glass set into the old heart’s housing, at shoulder height, on the side away from the cradle. A keeper’s port, for looking into a heart’s workings without opening it. Through it, Mara could see into the old heart’s interior: the six channels, dark red, with the white line of the fracture running across them. And at the back, low down, where the heart met the housing’s rear wall, a thread.
Thin. Pale. Almost white against the red. It came out of the heart’s inner chamber and ran through the housing’s wall and away, out of sight, into the network.
The bridge channel. The internal bridge. The channel the Custodian’s packet was coming to collapse.
It ran toward the remote lamps. To Lorn, to Tal, to the outer ring. Every relief path on Eshel’s board started here, at this pale thread.
“It’s tied to the old heart,” Mara said.
Eshel was beside her with his slate.
“Built into it,” he said. “Grown, never bolted. When the Founders built the star-heart, they grew the bridge out of the inner chamber the way the old heart at Lorn grew its channels.” He looked at the thread through the port. “It doesn’t come out cleanly. To move it to the replacement heart, it has to be separated from the old one.”
