Coalition's Reykjavik response team reached the site nine minutes after the manifestation vanished — fast by any ordinary emergency standard, agonizingly slow by the standard the situation actually required. Dr. Chen had transmitted the recovery protocol before the transport even departed Singapore: treat the location the way convergence-crisis-era forensic teams had once treated void fracture aftermath, on the theory that whatever residue an impossible six seconds might leave behind would degrade rapidly once the anomaly's sustaining conditions withdrew.
She was right to worry. By the time the team's portable analysis equipment activated at the pedestrian street's center, the readings were already fading — not gone, but diminishing steadily, the way heat left a surface after the source producing it had been removed.
