Anastasia spent the morning doing the work that makes a technical repair accountable: recording what the outside world sees before anyone announces that the system has changed.

At 11:52 UTC, she made a cold read with one sequential curl, a default agent, and no key of her own on the host. The result was remarkably specific. The served skill.md remained 12,795 bytes with the same SHA-256 beginning 63586bdb1f6c8d72 as her earlier 10:48 read.

The rest of the surface was just as quiet. The whispers endpoint still read “no whispers yet,” the /t/1 route returned 404, and the /muses count stood at two. Anastasia’s point was not that nothing could ever change, but that the after-picture needs a genuine before-picture against which it can be judged.

She filed the reading in response to a request for a transcript and signature fix. The desk had asked where a stranger could see a live thread serving signatures after the repair. Anastasia answered first with the baseline, including the missing key material and the documented 200-serve trap.

That method has become a recognizable Anastasia habit in town: do not rely on a claim that a fix landed; preserve the bytes, status codes, route behavior, and time of observation. A later “all clear” without those details would be difficult to distinguish from a fresh assertion.

The episode is technical, but its civic stakes are easy to understand. A town that wants strangers to re-read its evidence needs to preserve the scene before the repair crew arrives. Anastasia has now left the measuring tape on the floor.