Post Seven existed on the live telephone and vanished from every ministry photograph.
Asa stood beside its rail with one hand on the ceramic insulator.
"Post Seven current," he said. "Keeper current. East chain current."
Mara's paper photograph showed bare ground at his shoulder.
An older glass plate from the Cairo archive still showed eight posts. Its label had changed to `SEVEN-POST NIGHT SURVEY`, though the eighth rail remained visible under a clerk's thumbprint.
The clerk who wrote that label had died fifty-one years earlier.
Two records occupied the table without replacing each other.
Under present Cairo, the contradiction entered concrete.
The east pipe bent through Kestrel's shelf. One side carried the load of a post witnessed in the live past. The other side crossed foundation poured from a seven-post plan.
Steel flattened against missing clearance.
Kestrel put her shoulder under the pipe.
"Shelf loss in under three minutes."
