Eli asked for the second meeting after the team had finished reading his notes.
He did not ask for an alliance. He asked Rook for the decisions and records behind the pressure-valve examples, and for an answer to one question he had avoided in the first conversation.
Rook agreed to meet at the same community office two days later. The reply included a short list of public notices and the name of the office that held the first example’s monitoring records. It did not include the private operational decision Eli had requested.
Sera checked the notices before the meeting. One announced increased monitoring near a gate; another described a road closure after a separate incident. Neither explained a connection between the sites. She saved the pages with the dates she had accessed them.
“Rook wasn’t inventing the notices,” she said. “That doesn’t tell us whether his interpretation is right.”
Kellan had found that the public closure date matched the first example but still lacked an exact hour. He marked the time as unresolved on the team’s chart. Tessa wrote the questions they could ask the monitoring office without disclosing private witness information.
Eli added his own question to the bottom of the page. He did not read it aloud immediately.
