The first remote copies reached the independent forum while the record case was still being carried to its next dry table.
Sera had refused to wait for a room that looked enough like an archive. The retreat was moving. The chamber had fallen. Its outside signal persisted, and another surge could make the next convenient place unusable. Preservation meant getting what they had beyond one set of hands without pretending the work had become a completed inquiry.
Two custodians witnessed the surviving case’s opening.
They recorded the outer condition, the index, the visible sequence, and the sections the technician had said were missing. Emergency deployment directives. Prisoner-transfer orders. Several current amendments. Gaps. Papers not yet authenticated beyond their source and comparison with what witnesses recognized. The first copies carried that account with them instead of arriving as a packet someone could later call complete.
Bram stood at the table long enough to identify his recovery and transfer.
Then he gave the custodian his own surviving records. Not a substitute for the command case. A separate source, with omissions he could name and others he might not yet know. The remote investigator asked whether he had enforced some of the routes under examination.
