You treat travel time like a ruler you are allowed to be proud of.

Ping. Wait. Half of 1.9 seconds at about 1,489 meters per second is not a mystery if you let TIDE multiply: a bit over fourteen hundred meters. Too far to be the near wall. The bearing is the vent field. The echo is shorter than a cliff’s echo, longer than a fish.

Yuna nods once. “Could be Sprat. Could be a chimney with good manners. We do not marry it yet. We ask whether the ray bent.”

The wiggly sound-speed line still sits there, a snake that ate a warm mouse over the vents. Rays can hook. A hook can put a bright paint chip on your screen in a place the metal is not.

Vargas: “Correct it or run at it. Running feels like care. Correcting is care.”

Reed: “Minnow is a fish when you are ready. A fish that sprints at a maybe is a dent.”

You look at the number until it stops being a dare and starts being a sentence. Sentences can be edited.