Chestnut hair. Measuring eyes.
She came up the east road in Brotherhood colors—the particular shade of blue-gray that announced institutional authority without requiring explanation. Young. Mid-twenties at most, with the kind of posture that suggested recent credentialing and the need to prove it justified. Her pack was small, her clothing practical, and her first action upon reaching the colony perimeter was to present a formal document to the sentry rather than asking to speak with anyone.
"Investigation mandate," Davan reported, finding me at the administrative table. "Junior Brotherhood operative. She's been assigned to assess engineering outputs that are—" he glanced at the document in his hand, "—'statistically inconsistent with the colony's population and resource base.'"
Statistically inconsistent. The numbers I've been producing have attracted exactly the attention I should have anticipated.
"What's her name?"
"Triss Merigold."
The name landed with a particular weight. Triss. I knew that name from the games, the books, the Netflix series. Yennefer's friend. Geralt's brief entanglement. A sorceress who would eventually stand at the center of some of the Continent's most significant events.
But not yet. Now she's twenty-two years old and investigating a borderland colony for irregularities.
"Show her to the planning room. I'll meet her there."
Triss Merigold did not want to meet with me.
She presented her credentials—Brotherhood seal, investigation scope, authorization from someone whose name I didn't recognize—and then immediately asked to speak with the tunneling crews rather than the Colony Director. Her working thesis, which she didn't state directly but which her first three questions implied, was magical compulsion of the workforce.
"The structural output from your Level 2 operations," she said, not quite looking at me, "exceeds what a population of this size should produce by approximately thirty-four percent."
"Thirty-seven percent," I corrected. "I've done the calculations myself."
Her eyes met mine for the first time. "You've noticed the discrepancy."
"I created it. The calculations assume average worker efficiency and standard engineering protocols. Our protocols aren't standard."
"Hence the investigation." She picked up her pack. "I'll need access to your tunneling operations, your workers for interview purposes, and your construction documentation. The Brotherhood typically receives cooperation in these matters."
"You'll have it."
She left without further conversation, heading toward the Level 2 entrance where the morning shift was assembling.
For five days, Triss spoke to workers and measured walls.
Not to me—she avoided the administrative chamber entirely, conducting her investigation through direct observation and interview. The census board showed her as "Brotherhood External — Investigation Active," a classification I hadn't known the system could generate but which apparently covered outside authorities conducting assessments.
She interviewed Brec about the Shaft C collapse. She asked Brac about the arch designs for the Level 2 copper seam. She spent an entire afternoon with Shani, discussing medical outcomes and worker health patterns. She took measurements of wall thickness, support spacing, ventilation angles—the specific details that would reveal whether the construction had been accomplished through normal labor or enhanced by magical assistance.
On Day 5, she missed her scheduled Brotherhood report deadline.
I noticed because Davan noticed, and Davan noticed because tracking external observers' communication patterns was exactly the kind of intelligence he specialized in gathering.
"She was supposed to file a preliminary assessment by today," he said. "She didn't."
"Why not?"
"I don't know." His expression suggested this uncertainty bothered him professionally. "Either she's found something significant enough to delay reporting, or she's revised her initial thesis and doesn't know how to explain the revision to her superiors."
Or both.
On Day 6, I went to her.
She had claimed a corner of the planning room as her workspace—documents spread across the table, notes in a cramped hand I couldn't read from across the room, a small collection of measurement instruments arranged with precise organization. She looked up when I entered but didn't speak.
I carried a chalkboard, a piece of chalk, and three force diagrams I'd prepared that morning.
"The Level 2 copper seam structure," I said, setting the chalkboard on an empty portion of the table. "This is the load-path calculation that explains why the output is consistent with what a civil engineer would extract without magic."
I began drawing. The primary support distribution. The load-bearing arch configuration that transferred weight away from the extraction zones. The ventilation network that doubled as structural reinforcement through strategic stone placement.
Triss watched without speaking. Her eyes tracked the chalk marks with the particular attention of someone who understood what they were seeing—not a magical analysis, but an engineering one. The same mathematical language I'd used in Edinburgh, translated into medieval mining terminology.
When I finished, she stood and walked to the board.
"Your material estimate for the secondary support here is wrong," she said, pointing to a load value I'd assigned to the connecting arches. "Mahakam granite at this depth has approximately eight percent higher compression tolerance than your calculation assumes."
I pulled my working ledger from my pocket and opened it to the relevant page. "The correction."
She watched me write her amendment into my documentation without comment or argument.
"You keep a failure log," she said.
"It's a cost-of-design register. Every engineering decision has trade-offs. I track the ones I got wrong so I can avoid repeating them."
She looked at the chalkboard again—at the calculation as a whole, not at the error she'd corrected. Her expression had shifted from investigative skepticism to something more difficult to read.
"This is not the explanation I brought with me," she said.
She said it to the diagram, not to me.
I left the chalkboard where it was when I returned to my own work.
She might have more questions. The force diagrams were accurate, and accurate things didn't require supervision. Either she would reach the correct conclusion on her own, or she would ask for additional information.
The Brotherhood sent a junior operative to investigate magical compulsion. They sent someone who corrects material estimates on sight.
They sent someone who looks at engineering calculations the way I look at them.
The investigation was still active. The missed report deadline was still unexplained. But something had shifted in the dynamic between us—from adversarial assessment to something that didn't have a name yet.
The questions I couldn't answer for her were the same questions I couldn't answer for myself. Why the outputs were what they were. Why the system I didn't discuss produced results that appeared impossible by normal standards.
The chalkboard stood in the planning room, waiting for whatever came next.
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