Sera carried two lists to the family contact desk and placed them in separate folders.
One was the reconciled stadium evacuation roster: the one hundred eighty-six people inside when the rescue began, each with a verified safe handover. The other was a growing contact list assembled from relatives, earlier shelter visitors, volunteers on different shifts and people who had left by other routes before that count. A mark missing from the second did not mean someone had been secretly left inside the stadium. It meant the desk still lacked an answer it could give the person asking.
The distinction had been clear to the recorders during the evacuation. It became less clear after copied pages began arriving without their covers.
A volunteer held up one such copy. “People are reading this as everyone who ever came through.”
“Then we put the scope back on it,” Sera said.
She wrote a plain explanation for the desk and asked the receiving recorder to check it. They did not publish an assertion that every person connected with the stadium had been found. They could verify the completed inside rescue and continue searching for others at the same time.
The first family arrived carrying a folded appointment card. Their aunt had gone to the stadium before the gate changes, hoping to find a neighbor assigned there. They did not know whether she stayed. Her name did not appear under the spelling they supplied.
