A dispatch clerk called Sera with a detail missing from the team’s first chart: another gate had opened near the monitored site before the apparent surge.
She asked him to send the entry and its source, then spread the new log beside the three closure records. The entry gave a date and an approximate time; it did not include a synchronized instrument reading.
Kellan looked at the new mark. “Could that opening have produced the surge?”
“Possibly,” Sera said. “The closure could also have contributed. We don’t have enough information to separate them.”
Eli checked the other two cases. One showed no clear rise at the available station; the other lacked later readings. He had wanted those cases to settle the argument against Rook’s theory, but neither established the whole network’s behavior.
Sera wrote the newly reported opening on the chart in a different color, with its uncertain time shown as a band. She marked the missing records rather than drawing the line through them. The window above the clinic was open after Mrs. Ortega’s repair, and a bus hissed to a stop below.
“Now we have a competing event to investigate,” Tessa said. “Who can help us tell whether the instruments could distinguish it?”
