They found her on the second day north of the dense crystal zone, which was to say that she found them, because Oma Singe-Feu's method of finding things involved determining where things would logically be and arriving there before being told, which was, as she would explain to anyone who asked, simply the application of engineering principles to the problem of location.
She was sitting on a flat crystal formation at the edge of the northern approach path, eating something from a cloth-wrapped package, with the complete physical ease of someone who had been waiting for approximately the right amount of time and had used the wait productively. Beside her on the formation was a pack that was noticeably larger than anyone else's in the company, and that had, protruding from its top, three things that Kael did not recognize and one that he recognized as an improved version of the Echo-Blood resonance detector she had described in Syrenne's account of her.
He had not met her before. Syrenne had. He understood this from the way Syrenne stopped walking when she saw the figure on the formation, a full stop rather than a pace adjustment, and then said, without inflection but with something underneath the inflection that was not surprise but was its warmer cousin: "Oma."
The small woman on the rock looked up. Her eyes found Syrenne and the expression on her face was the expression of someone who had expected the arrival they were witnessing but was glad to have the expectation confirmed. "You're two days later than I calculated," she said. "I've revised the calculation twice. I was going to give you one more day before I assumed something had changed the route."
"How did you calculate where we'd be," Syrenne said.
"The Collector's activation was detectable from the Cités Libres with the right equipment. I have the right equipment. I calculated the probable development timeline for someone who had just activated a six-hundred-year-old archive and cross-referenced it with the known terrain between the Collector and the northern ridge communities." She looked at Kael. "You're the Anomaly."
"Kael Vorne," he said.
"I know who you are. I've been tracking the Empire's Level Omega development documentation for eight months. You're the most interesting person the Empire has been afraid of in my professional lifetime, which is admittedly only six years of professional capacity but still." She slid off the crystal formation and picked up her pack with the ease of someone who had been carrying oversized equipment for long enough that the weight had become part of their normal. "I'm Oma Singe-Feu. I'm an engineer. I left Imperial service eight months ago when I realized my supervisor's supervisor's supervisor was using my atmospheric Echo-Blood concentration analysis to design more effective Divine Anomaly detection equipment, and I found that use insufficiently interesting compared to the alternative." A pause. "The alternative being: building better equipment for the side that isn't trying to neutralize the most significant development in post-Night-of-Erasure history."
Kael looked at her. He looked at the pack, and the protruding instruments, and the way she looked at him with the complete focused curiosity of someone who had been working toward a conversation for eight months and was experiencing the specific satisfaction of the work having been justified.
"You've been following us," he said.
"I've been running a parallel track," she said. "Following implies I knew where you were. I knew where you would logically be. The distinction matters to me for methodological reasons." She looked at Syrenne. "I tried to reach you before you left the Cités Libres but the timing was wrong. I've been calculating intercept points since."
Syrenne looked at her for a moment with the expression that was not assessment and not integration but the specific warm quality she reserved for the very small number of people in her world who had, over time, earned the category. "You could have sent a message."
"I did send a message. To your Guild contact in Thresh-Bas. He said you'd already left." She adjusted the pack strap. "I thought about it and decided it was more efficient to calculate the intercept than to wait for a response channel that might not be monitored."
"You walked into the Fracture Lands alone," Vorath said. He was not alarmed. He was applying his standard assessment.
"I walked into the early Fracture Lands with appropriate equipment and a map I developed from twelve years of atmospheric Echo-Blood concentration data," Oma said. "The dense crystal zone was more challenging than projected. I revised three sections of the map in transit. The revisions are improvements."
Vorath looked at the pack, at the instruments protruding from it. "What are those."
"The tall one with the amber housing is a portable Echo-Blood coherence detector, third prototype. It can identify and distinguish up to six simultaneous divine resonance signatures in a radius of approximately two kilometers. More practically: it can tell you where the Empire's response team is at any given moment as long as they're within range and their equipment is active, which it will be because their standard operating procedure requires continuous active scanning during approach." She looked at Kael. "The blue one is a version of the containment support device I designed after reading your sister's account in the Guild archive."
"I don't have a sister," Kael said.
"The Guild has a secondhand account of your capabilities from a Relic Hunter named Ash who encountered an activated Level Five Anomaly in the border regions and wrote it up for her contract report. It described the Anomaly's management of the divine contacts in terms that suggested the containment protocol was a significant load." She looked at him. "I designed a device that produces a low-level resonance stabilization field, which reduces the ambient pressure in the carrier's immediate environment and reduces the maintenance load on the containment protocol by approximately twenty percent. Possibly more. I haven't been able to test it on an actual Anomaly carrier. I've been waiting for one."
He looked at the blue instrument. "It reduces the maintenance load."
"By my calculations, yes. I'm interested in what the actual figure is." She looked at him with the specific brightness of an engineer who had designed something and was now adjacent to the first real-world test. "May I?"
* * *
She may.
The device, activated, produced no visible effect. No light, no sound, no physical sensation that Kael could identify with certainty as the device rather than expectation. But after three minutes of wearing the small housing on his wrist where Oma had placed it, adjusted twice for what she described as calibration and he experienced as a slight warmth at the contact point, the maintenance load of the containment protocol had decreased in a way that was measurably real.
He checked the internal inventory. The four contacts were present at normal intensity. The containment protocol was running at the same configuration as before. But the resource it was drawing was lower, the way a machine running on cleaner fuel drew less from the same energy source. The ambient Korrath pressure in the Fracture Lands ground was the same. The resonance stabilization field was doing what Oma had said it would do: reducing the noise rather than increasing the signal, which made the signal easier to hold.
"Twenty-three percent," he said.
Oma had her notebook out. She wrote this down with the speed of someone who had been waiting for the number. "Higher than projected. Interesting. The stabilization field may be interacting with the four-contact configuration in a way the single-contact model didn't predict." She looked up. "Does it change the quality of the contacts or only the load."
"Only the load. The contacts are unchanged."
"Good. A quality change would suggest interference rather than support, which would have required a complete redesign." She made several additional notes. "I'll want to test it at higher operational intensity over the next few days. Not the maintenance mode. The active architectural operation."
"We're not in conditions for extended architectural operations at the moment," he said.
"I know. I've read the timeline. The Empire's advance element is six to eight hours behind you, the main body is three days behind that, and you need to reach the northern ridge communities before the main body can assemble a containment perimeter." She looked at the northern approach. "I have a route modification that saves approximately four hours. I calculated it this morning."
"Show Vorath," Kael said.
"I was going to show everyone. It's more interesting if everyone understands the reasoning."
He looked at her. He looked at Syrenne, who was watching Oma with the expression that was adjacent to warmth, the quality she showed for the small number of people who had earned a permanent category.
"How did you know to find us," he said to Oma. "The route modification, the intercept calculation. How long have you been working on this."
"Eight months on the theoretical preparation. Seventy days on the active tracking since the Collector activated." She met his eyes with the directness of someone who had been working toward this moment for a defined period and was not going to understate the investment. "I left Imperial service because I figured out what my work was being used for. I started building the alternative because I figured out what the alternative needed. I built the alternative because it was the right problem to solve and I am someone who solves the right problems when I identify them." A pause. "I'm also aware that this is a significant claim from someone who arrived out of the Fracture Lands with a large pack and an untested prototype device. If you want confirmation of my technical capacity, the device's performance is the confirmation."
"Twenty-three percent," Kael said.
"Yes."
He looked at Vorath. Vorath looked at him. Vorath gave the specific nod that meant he had assessed a situation and found it what it appeared to be. This was the most extensive endorsement Vorath gave.
"Welcome to the company," Kael said.
Oma looked briefly, completely, and entirely unselfconsciously pleased, in the way that engineers looked when the design worked. Then she put the expression away and said: "Thank you. Now let me show you the route modification."
* * *
She showed them the route modification.
It was, as she had promised, interesting to understand the reasoning, and it saved four hours on the timeline by routing through a canyon system that Vorath's maps showed as impassable and that Oma's atmospheric data showed was impassable only in the season they were not currently in. The canyon had been flooded for six months of the year for the past twelve years, but the current season's precipitation patterns had left it dry, and the atmospheric Echo-Blood concentration in the canyon's walls was so high that any resonance scanning from the advance element would produce complete noise for approximately twelve kilometers of the approach route.
"You developed precipitation pattern data for the Fracture Lands canyons from atmospheric analysis," Cassin said. She said it with the flatness of someone verifying a claim rather than expressing admiration, and managed to convey admiration anyway through the precision of the verification.
"Twelve years of Imperial atmospheric survey data," Oma said. "The Empire collected it for Echo-Blood concentration mapping. The precipitation data was an accidental byproduct that no one at the survey office had found a use for. I found a use for it."
"Eight months ago."
"Seven months and twenty-two days. I found the dataset seven months and twenty-two days ago. The Collector activated approximately six weeks later."
"You were preparing before the Collector activated."
"I was preparing for what I calculated would eventually need to be prepared for. The Collector's activation confirmed the timeline." She looked at Cassin. "Is there a problem."
"No," Cassin said. She looked at Verath. Verath made a very small gesture that Kael had learned was Verath's version of agreement combined with approval.
The company moved into the canyon route that afternoon, into the twelve kilometers of resonance noise that Oma's twelve years of Imperial atmospheric data had found a use for.
Kael walked with the twenty-three percent reduction in the containment protocol's load, and with the specific quality of a company that had, in the space of one afternoon, become eleven rather than ten, and was better for the becoming.
He wrote, at the day's end, in the last margin: Oma Singe-Feu. Engineer. Arrived out of the Fracture Lands with a prototype device and a route modification that saved four hours and a complete confidence in the rightness of her own analysis that is the most specific and functional kind of confidence I have observed. Vyrath said immediately, privately, without being asked: she's going to be important. Syrenne did not say anything. But she watched Oma all afternoon with the expression that is not the catalog and that I now understand as the expression she uses for things that have earned permanence. Oma has already earned it. I find this unsurprising and entirely right.