The figurines had been waiting for them to ask the right question.
David spread them across the workbench in the Navigation Room—seven silver shapes on isolated platforms. Margaret stood beside him, V-rod data from Scotland on her tablet. They'd landed at SFO twelve hours ago. Neither had slept.
"We've been reading them wrong," Margaret said.
She picked up the boar carefully, examining the incised symbols along its flanks. "We assumed these were navigation coordinates. Destination addresses. But the structure doesn't match the standing stones. These symbols aren't locations."
David picked up the hound, comparing. She was right—clearly the same system, but organized differently.
"ARCHIE. Compare the figurine inscriptions to each other rather than the standing stone corpus. Look for relational patterns."
A pause. Then:
Base inscriptions do not encode navigation coordinates. Symbol patterns describe relationships between figurines. Specifically: compatibility indicators for paired use.
"Compatibility," Margaret said slowly. "Who can work with whom."
Boar-hound form one compatible group. Salmon-serpent another. Bull and beast a third. Cross-group pairings show warning symbols.
ARCHIE rendered the relationships as a network diagram—nodes for each figurine, lines indicating compatibility, warning marks on forbidden combinations.
"It's a pairing matrix," David said. "They weren't encoding routes. They were encoding which practition…
