They came on a market day, which was, I later understood, deliberate.
Market day in Maxentius was the one day when strangers in the village did not attract significant attention. Traders came through. Buyers from nearby settlements arrived. The social atmosphere was one of generalized commercial activity, and two additional strangers with goods to sell or assess blended into it without friction.
I noticed them anyway.
They were good at their cover. The equipment they carried looked like a standard assessor's kit, the kind that mobile rank examiners used when offering services to rural settlements too far from a Conclave office to access formal assessments. The story would have been that they had passed through the region, saw a market, offered the service as a courtesy.
What gave them away to me was not what they were carrying. It was how they moved. People who sell things move toward people. These two moved through the space with the orientation of people collecting information, constantly peripheral, watching the whole room rather than their immediate audience.
They were Conclave operatives. Very probably the follow-up to the anomaly reports I had been anticipating since the scanner incident.
I was three years old. I maintained the behavioral profile of a three-year-old and made no adjustment to my routine.
They scanned everyone methodically, starting from the edge of the market and working inward. The device they were using was significantly more sophisticated than the merchant's consumer product. It did not simply display a rank numeral. It ran extended analysis, and I could see from the way the taller of the two was processing the readouts that it was capturing data at multiple levels.
Every scan in Maxentius came back clean. F, F, E, F, F, a D who worked as one of the field managers for the eastern farms, F, F, D.
They worked their way around the market.
They reached me.
Mara was beside me, looking at cloth from one of the seasonal traders. She noticed the assessors the way everyone noticed anything on market day, casually and without particular investment.
The taller one, a woman with a precise way of holding herself, crouched slightly to bring the device to my level.
She activated it.
The device processed for approximately one second, which was faster than any of the other assessments I had observed. Then the display went blank. Not zero, not unreadable, simply blank, as if the field for the result had been cleared.
She tried again.
The display went blank again.
I looked at her the way a three-year-old looks at someone who is doing something they do not understand, which is to say with open, uncomplicated attention.
The woman looked at me.
Something crossed her face. Not fear exactly. The specific expression of a professional who has encountered a result that does not fit the available categories and has the self-awareness to recognize that this is more significant than an equipment issue.
She tried a third time.
The device made a very small sound and the display cracked down the center.
The shorter agent, who had been watching, took one step backward without appearing to notice he had done it.
The woman straightened. Her expression had returned to professional neutrality with the speed of someone who had excellent training.
'Older equipment,' she said to no one in particular. 'Battery problem.'
Mara made a sympathetic noise and returned to the cloth.
The woman looked at me once more. I looked back at her with the frank, direct attention of a toddler who had not yet learned that sustained eye contact was considered unusual.
She turned away.
They finished their sweep. They did not approach me again. They left the market before noon, and I tracked their direction of departure and concluded they were heading back toward the main road rather than looking for lodging in the village.
They would file a report. The report would go up the chain. Whatever was in that eight-hundred-year-old classified file that they had or had not found would be part of the context.
I had, probably, somewhere between a few months and a year before this became a more direct problem.
That was fine. I was three. I had time.
What I did not have was a clear sense of what I would do when the time ran out, but I had found that problems of that nature resolved themselves more clearly as they approached.
I would wait and see.
Patience, as it turned out, was the one thing I had learned from the void that had sent me here.