The Registry bulletin arrived while White Orchard was still clearing mud from the market lane.
Ning brought it into the assembly hall folded twice, with a courier’s seal pressed into the paper. The headline named Shen Yan as the cause of the furnace-town losses. Beneath it, a column listed the dead by name. Several had worked with Han Yue during the evacuation. Beside each name, the bulletin printed a time and a route.
“They have the names right,” Ning said. “The times are wrong.”
Yan read the first page again. He remembered the signal flags at the ridge, the time the barrier began to fail, and the stretch of road where the families had waited for the southern wagon. The report said he had ordered the route changed after the last families were already exposed. The order had come before that. Han’s authenticated command log would show it.
The bulletin did not include Han’s log.
Wei stood at the end of the table, reading the dates. He had arrived at the border after the earliest evacuation, but he remembered the later signals and the time his unit reached the road.
“These flags can’t be right,” he said. “The second signal came before the column turned. This account puts it after.”
