The first courier carrying word of the wall-mount engagement reached the Arch the morning after Arka'garr's report went out, having traveled through the night.
Aliyah read it at the instrument room's main station, with Darak beside her.
Eight entities, two hours, five dissolved on contact, three finished by the garrison, two minor injuries, the arc holding.
She read it twice and felt something she had not expected: relief that was almost separate from the report's content, relief that the thing they had raced toward for weeks had arrived and the arc had simply done what it was built to do.
"Eleven days early," Darak said, reading over her shoulder. "Dhug'mhar's revised estimate held for the rate. It did not hold for when the rate would stop being the relevant number."
"The boundary did not slow or speed up," Aliyah said. "It reached the arc, a fixed point, sooner than seven more days of the same rate would suggest, because the rate from eleven days ago was already an average."
