The director's monitoring equipment registered the change at the fourth hour.
Not sovereign pressure. Not a zone boundary shift. Something below those. The Rift's oscillation amplitude—which had been running at its lowest level since the eastern district event, stable, reduced, the Rift having exhaled after six years of anticipation—began climbing.
Slowly at first. The monitoring equipment's baseline alert threshold was ten percent above the post-event amplitude. The climb crossed that threshold at the sixth hour. By the time Kai reached the Division at the eighth hour, the director had been watching it for four hours and had not slept.
The director was at his desk with three monitoring logs spread across the surface. Not his standard organised arrangement. The logs were open at specific pages, placed side by side for comparison, and the comparison had been annotated in pencil with brackets and question marks and one phrase circled twice in the centre log.
