The market closed for six days.
Rodriguez authorized compensation for every displaced vendor personally, understanding that whatever else this operation required, it couldn't require civilian hardship as unacknowledged cost. Coalition's engineering team erected a discrete perimeter around the location's confirmed thin-point—Dr. Chen's instruments now mapping the boundary's structural properties with a precision the original Sector 12 investigation had taken weeks to achieve, benefiting from every methodological refinement eighteen months of subsequent development had produced.
What made this attempt different from Sector 12, everyone involved understood from the outset, was direction.
