“Now look at the entries from the summer,” Ruth said, bending over Claire’s shoulder.

Claire slid her pen down the page until the numbers stopped at June twelfth, three in the morning.

A three-second connection record showed the emergency code, followed right away by a hardware disconnect flag.

“It happened again on August fourth,” Claire said, her voice dropping half an octave.

“And on October nineteenth.”

“Three calls,” Ruth said.

“All three of them reached the trunk line for under four seconds before the line went dead.”

“Those weren’t system-wide network errors,” Claire said.