Next Steps

"Not on the distribution grid of the Ninety-One Chains." Vivi picked up the Brazilian forwarding letter in front of her again. "Did Director Rahmani mention the signal's specific characteristics? Any parameters we can compare against the chains we already know?"

"Yes." Ms. Rosier drew a densely packed data sheet from the folder. Clearly, she had already read the report inside out on her way here. "The signal frequency is similar to the known Seal in the Lut Desert, but not a complete match. The pulse intervals are longer, and the waveform is more regular."

She paused for a moment and glanced at Vivi.

"Depth measurements show that the signal source is located approximately twenty-three kilometers underground, deeper than any Seal marked on the LeMay Map. Director Rahmani stayed in the Temporary Monitoring Station for an entire night and discovered that the signal repeats one complete pulse sequence every seven hours and thirty-three minutes, with an error margin of no more than 0.3 seconds. He said that kind of precision could not have been produced by natural geological movement."

Anne looked up. "There was an occultist in the Victorian era named Ignatius Brock who once proposed a theory. He believed the Earth itself had a breathing cycle, roughly seven hours and thirty minutes. The theory was later ruled pseudoscience by the Confederation, and Brock himself was treated as a joke by historians of magic, but his cycle differs from this signal by only a few minutes."

Pabbie sat up straight on the sofa, her cuffs still rolled to her elbows.

"You mean that signal source might be even older than the Ninety-Nine Chains? So old that the cycle it produces is synchronized with the rhythm of the Earth itself?"

"I don't know. But if Brock's theory wasn't pseudoscience, if he really