The maintenance crew filed their preliminary report three days after the terrace failure.
Halden received it in the administrative offices on the east side of campus, a narrow room with a single window and a desk that had been used by at least four proctors before him. The report was four pages, typed on standard Academy stock, with two hand-drawn diagrams and a column of observations that had been checked and initialed by the crew lead.
He read it twice before he started making notes.
---
The first page was straightforward.
Pre-existing structural weakness. The retaining wall's foundation had been undermined by subsurface loss of support — a void beneath the affected section, roughly two meters across. The crew estimated it had been present for an unknown period. Years, possibly. Decades. There was no way to date it from the surface.
Halden read that part again.
A void that size, under a terrace that had been walked on daily for years, and nobody had noticed. He didn't think that was negligence. The crew's diagram showed the void was below the foundation line, well under the load-bearing course. From above, the terrace looked exactly like a terrace. There was no reason for anyone to have found it.
That was the thing about the report. It was explaining a failure that couldn't have been predicted from the information anyone had.
He moved to the second page.
Water movement had contributed. The crew noted abnormal drainage patterns — mineral staining along the wall base consistent with flow reversal. They didn't speculate on the cause. They just noted it as an observation.
Halden underlined flow reversal.
Kara had reported the same thing during the engagement. He remembered her statement. Water moving the wrong way in the drainage channel, at the same time the terrace started to fail. He'd written it down. He hadn't thought much of it at the time.
Now the crew was confirming it independently.
He turned to the third page.
Structural failure had occurred during the engagement. Dynamic loading — footfalls, impacts, shifting weight — was a contributing factor. The underlying support deficiency predated the incident.
That was the important sentence, and he read it slowly.
The fight didn't cause the failure. The fight disturbed a system that was already compromised. Footfalls and impacts and shifting weight were just the last thing that happened before the threshold was crossed. If the engagement hadn't happened, something else would have eventually done the same thing.
Or maybe nothing would have. The report didn't say.
He read the fourth page.
The failure mechanism was not completely established. The crew recommended further excavation, temporary stabilization, and continued access restriction.
That was the part where the report stopped.
---
Halden set it down and picked up his slate.
He wrote his own observations next to theirs. He'd done this before — it was a habit he'd picked up years ago, keeping his own account separate from the official one so he could see whether they matched.
Airflow anomaly reported by Cadet Xander. Verified by Halden at time of observation. Not independently reproduced by Specialist Renn.
Drainage reversal observed by Cadet Kara during engagement. Consistent with crew's note on flow reversal.
Ground instability observed by Cadet Drake before structural failure. Consistent with crew's note on compromised support.
Structural failure progressed over approximately forty seconds. No sudden collapse.
He stopped.
Four observations. He looked at them one at a time.
Three of them had physical evidence. Kara's drainage reversal matched the crew's mineral staining. Drake's ground instability matched the void. His own note about the forty-second progression matched the crew's assessment of gradual failure.
Three of the four were corroborated.
One wasn't.
The airflow.
He read his own note again. Verified by Halden at time of observation. Not independently reproduced by Specialist Renn.
He remembered the grass leaning east. He remembered holding his hand out and feeling nothing. He remembered that the observation had been his, briefly, and then it had stopped being anything the Academy could use.
That was the problem. It wasn't that Xander had been wrong. It was that the same evidence that made the other three observations credible was absent here. There was nothing to corroborate. There was no second measurement, no physical trace, no independent witness. Just a cadet's hand held over a patch of grass.
He couldn't put that in an operational report.
But he also couldn't call it false.
---
He went back through the report one more time, looking for something he'd missed.
The crew had measured the void. They had measured the water. They had measured the load. Every measurement they'd taken was consistent with the failure they'd found.
What they hadn't measured was the airflow.
There was a reason for that. The airflow wasn't there anymore. Whatever Xander had felt, whatever Halden had briefly verified, it had stopped after the terrace settled. It hadn't been continuous. It had been something that existed under specific conditions, and those conditions had changed.
Halden wrote that down.
Anomaly may have been dependent on pre-failure conditions. Not reproducible because conditions no longer present.
He looked at the sentence.
That was a possible explanation. It was also speculation. He couldn't prove it anymore than he could prove the airflow had been real. All he could say with certainty was that the observation had been made, it had been verified once, and it hadn't been verified again.
That was the same thing as saying he didn't know.
He read the sentence once more, then crossed it out. It wasn't a finding. It was a hypothesis, and his report didn't need hypotheses.
---
He picked up the report and read the final page again.
The crew had recommended further excavation and continued access restriction. Those were both reasonable. The void was still there. The terrace was still compromised. Restricting access was the obvious call.
What wasn't obvious was what to do with the anomaly.
He could attach it to the incident record. He could leave it as an unresolved observation. He could recommend follow-up. Each of those choices was defensible.
But the Academy wasn't going to investigate an airflow that no longer existed. There was nothing to investigate. Any follow-up would just confirm what Renn had already found — ambient readings, no anomaly.
The record would say unresolved forever, because there was nothing left to resolve.
Halden tapped his stylus against the slate.
---
He wrote his recommendation in plain language.
Terrace access remains restricted pending further structural review. Squad Seven's inspection route is changed to the eastern service road until Section 7 is cleared. The airflow observation remains attached to the incident record as an unresolved observation. No operational conclusion is drawn regarding its relationship to the structural failure.
He read it once.
Then he added one more line.
Additional observations from the engagement are consistent with the crew's preliminary findings on subsurface conditions. No further investigation is recommended at this time.
He paused.
That last line wasn't quite true. He did think further investigation was warranted — just not by him. Not by the Academy's operational side. If the subsurface void mattered, the structural crew would find it. If the airflow mattered, someone else would determine that. If neither mattered, the record would sit.
He didn't cross the line out. He just moved it below the recommendation where it belonged.
Then he submitted the report.
---
That evening, he walked the eastern service road alone.
The terrace was still roped off. The maintenance crew had set up a second tripod near the drainage channel and left it overnight. From the road, he could see the chalk marks they'd made on the retaining wall — long vertical lines indicating where the foundation had shifted, short horizontal lines marking crack propagation.
He stopped at Section 7.
The wall was still there. Intact. No visible damage.
He crouched at the base and held his hand out over the grass.
The blades were leaning east.
He stayed there for a moment.
Then he stood up and walked back toward the administrative offices.
He didn't write anything down.
There was nothing to write.