Yenna pushed the sixth resonance rod into the gravel until its tip bit the undisturbed bed beneath.
The needles stayed flat while Surveyor Holt shook the readout, hunting for a single gate scar beneath the split mountain. Yenna checked the rod's seating twice before accepting that the silence belonged to the site itself and not her instruments.
Holt rapped the nearest needle with a knuckle while his clerks hovered over their blank recording sheets.
"Nothing," he snapped, shoving the frame toward her, "no tear, no residue, not one trace of the threshold we came to certify, so somebody tell me what this expedition is supposed to record."
"This edge," Yenna said.
She knelt by the fault's clean cut beneath the fallen summit, pressing two fingers against the sheared face.
"The rock opened along its natural fracture, but something passed through here hard enough to tear the anchored roots apart."
