Mara had a system. This became apparent when she spread her notebook open on the table and he saw what was inside.
Not just sketches of marks. Maps. Dozens of pages of maps, hand-drawn, the city's street grid laid out in pencil with certain locations marked, annotated, cross-referenced. Crack locations. Body recovery sites. The movement patterns of shadow-follows she had tracked. Rift entry and exit data logged by date and duration.
A separate section for ability notes, each ability described in clinical terms with the cost documented beside it. It was the work of two years of methodical observation by someone who had been alone while doing it.
Kael looked at it for a long time.
"You were pre-med," he said.
"It shows?"
"You think like a diagnostician." He turned a page.
"You're not trying to understand the Rift as a phenomenon. You're trying to understand it as a system with rules you can learn."
She looked at him. "Is that wrong?"
"It's exactly right." He turned another page. "I just didn't expect to find someone who was already doing it." She was quiet for a moment.
"I found two others in the first six months," she said. "People with marks. I tried to work with them." She looked at the table. "One of them got reckless and I lost them in the Rift in month eight. The other one's marks got too dense. Drawer twelve, probably, though I don't know for certain."
He did not say he was sorry. She did not look like she wanted that.
"The cracks," he said instead. "You have eleven marked here."
"Eleven confirmed. Probably more I haven't found." She pointed to a cluster near the Harrow. "These three are stable. The others open and close. The two near the port district are unpredictable. I avoid those."
"What makes a crack stable?"
"Age, I think. The older the crack, the more settled the boundary between the surface and the Rift. The sorting facility one is at least fifty years old by my estimate. Maybe older." She tapped a mark near the edge of the map. "This one is new. Opened three weeks ago. I haven't gone near it."
"Why?"
"New cracks open for one of two reasons. The Rift is decaying somewhere nearby and the boundary is thinning. Or something in the Rift pushed it open deliberately." She met his eyes. "The first kind are manageable. The second kind are not."
Kael looked at the new crack's location.
Southgate district. Two miles from his apartment. Half a mile from a school.
"We should look at it," he said.
"We should absolutely not look at it," she said.
A pause. "In about a week," he said. "After I've been back into the sorting facility crack twice more. After I have a better baseline for what my Resonance is telling me." She looked at him for a long moment.
"You're going to do this regardless of what I say."
"I'm going to do it more carefully if you come."
Another long pause. She closed the notebook.
"One week," she said. "And I set the terms of approach."
"Agreed." She picked up her coffee.
"You're going to be a problem," she said. Not with hostility. More like a forecast. "Probably," Kael agreed.