Mira read the date three times before she noticed she had stopped breathing normally.
The casualty entry lay under a clear sheet on Ilyan’s board. Only that entry was uncovered. The others remained beneath a cloth, not because the names were more powerful hidden but because the council had approved a comparison one record at a time. An observer sat opposite her, close enough to see where her eyes and hands moved.
The dead traveler was a man she remembered from a later account.
Not this account. Not this date.
In the sequence she carried from the ruined future, he had still been alive at this point. His surviving sister had later used the same unstable route before the event that finally closed it. Mira had been preparing to warn that family before the remembered journey. She had thought she had several days.
The entry on the board placed his death earlier.
She kept her hands flat beside the page. Eli stood within the permitted comparison area, reading over her shoulder without touching the clear cover. She could feel his attention shift from the date to her face. He knew enough to understand why an ordinary line of ink had become dangerous. The observer did not know, and would not learn it from a careless sentence.
