By the morning after the trial, seven modules had passed inspection.
Seven frames, bolted to one drawing.
Mara had walked the bench at dawn and touched each one. Seven channels, stepped, lined with the last mirror offcuts. Seven governors, five of them with a control strip from the rod pool at the heart, each answering its load within a count of the others. Eshel had run the second full trial in the night, the one his margin note had asked for, and the lag had stayed fixed. He had gone to the well’s sheet at dawn and written beside Confidence partial: Second trial: lag stays fixed. Confidence for modules one to seven: full.
He had not written anything about the eighth.
The eighth module was the seventh branch, the last of them.
Mara had saved it for last on purpose. The seven others fed things she understood: lamps with people under them, the reservoir, the shaft stores. The eighth fed a place where nobody lived. Where the only resident was an archive in a cup-holding projection that dimmed every time someone drew power. She had not known how to think about it, so she had put it at the end of the bench and built everything else first. The one that would feed Sable’s cold shell: through the valve gallery, past the lead seal Sen had renewed, out along the old line to the dead station where Ysol’s archive kept its light.
