The Seam
Road
also: the road · roads
An authenticated operational route through a junction relationship — the thing a hull actually travels.
In full
A junction is geometry; a road is the route worked through it, surveyed and authenticated and kept. Guttering-age crews talk in roads almost exclusively — the word *junction* does not appear once in the prose of the later Cairn books. A road can be opened, held, stripped of its equipment, lost, or made readable again, and most of the field series is people doing one of those five things. ⚠ A road is not a corridor: a corridor is a temporary held passage into damaged wound geography, and confusing the two gets people killed.
Key facts
- An authenticated route through a junction relationship, or a sequence of them.
- The everyday word; junction is the underlying geometry and is barely spoken.
- Roads are surveyed, marked, maintained, and can be stripped or lost.
- Not a corridor. The distinction is operational, not stylistic.