The metal map remained open on the hospital floor after the last patient cart passed safely through the alley.
No one touched it without Vasa's permission. The junction had spent the morning proving that an elegant piece of infrastructure could hide a demand for obedience inside a routine fee. A map that surfaced when the toll broke deserved the same caution.
Vasa kept an ice thread on its edge while Diana copied the visible fields to three separate local records. The nine anchor lines shifted whenever the hospital frame accepted a maintenance load, as though the map was listening to the same contracts that kept the alley open.
"It is not a map of borders. It is a map of services," Diana said.
Each line had a city name at its origin, but the labels that mattered sat farther down the routes. One chain marked freight depots and cold stores.
