Serian held her offer on the shared record and did not soften it for the room. The muster floor had gone quiet around Vasa's rebuilt grid, where the anchor spine showed as ranked lines with one pale thread beneath them all.
Every commander in the room could read the concealed route now, a single line tying five cities to the Meridian Yard. None of them could put a hand on it, and Kest had built the spine sealed to every authority but his own.
Two of Nox's powers had already tried the ground and come back with the same flat denial. Whatever the grid showed them, the line itself stayed locked under cities none of them governed.
"Every meter of that route runs beneath ground my root already holds, so I can surface its whole length without a gate or a claim," Serian said, laying her territory across the grid. "The cost is that the moment my root grips a live anchor, my enclave lights up for every Meridian sensor on the spine."
