Two weeks in. Still no answer.
Triss had been at the colony eleven days now—six days past her scheduled preliminary report, four days past any reasonable extension period, and still working from her corner of the planning room with the same methodical intensity she'd shown since arriving.
I found her there in the early morning, before the first shift assembled. She was reviewing her notes with an expression I'd learned to recognize as frustration directed inward rather than outward.
"Magical compulsion is not what I'm observing," she said without preamble. She hadn't looked up when I entered. "I've found three instances of sub-optimal structural decisions—small, correctable—that would not exist if someone were using magic to maximize output."
"Which three?"
"The ventilation angle in the Level 1 northeast corridor—two degrees off optimal for air circulation. The support spacing in the Shaft C extension before the collapse—inconsistent with your documented protocol for that rock type. And the original longhouse foundation, which used a mortar mixture that reduced curing time but sacrificed approximately four percent of long-term structural integrity."
She found all three. The same three I've been tracking since I made them.
I pulled my working ledger from my pocket and opened it to the failure register. "Page twelve. All three are documented."
She looked at the ledger for a long moment. Her eyes moved down the page—not just the three errors she'd identified, but the others: the ore cart rail prioritization that had left Doran in inadequate housing, the population growth projection I'd underestimated, the winter food calculation that had required Davan's intervention.
"You track your own mistakes," she said.
"Design decisions have costs. The costs need documentation."
"Most administrators I've investigated hide their errors. They assume I'm looking for evidence of incompetence."
"Are you?"
"I was looking for evidence of magical enhancement." She closed my ledger and handed it back. "I'm not finding it. What I'm finding is consistent with a highly competent civil engineer working with better-than-average materials and a motivated workforce."
She's revised her thesis. Completely. Based on evidence.
"The Brotherhood will expect an explanation for the output discrepancy," I said.
"I know." She turned back to her notes. "I'm still working on how to explain what I've found in terms they'll accept."
She asked to see the Level 3 push that afternoon.
We descended together—through the familiar passages of Level 1, down the newer shafts to Level 2, and finally into the excavation corridors leading toward the coal seam at 40 meters depth. The torchlight threw shadows against the tunnel walls, and somewhere below us, the distant sound of pick-work marked the progress of the excavation crew.
Underground, with the SEG active behind my eyes, I watched Triss work. She moved her hands through the air in patterns I recognized as magical sensing—different from my system's overlay, but accomplishing a similar purpose. She was reading the stone the way I read it, searching for anomalies that would explain outputs that should have been impossible.
Near the warm-stone section—the area Brac had redirected us away from months ago, where the stone carried a heat that had no obvious source—she stopped.
"There's a faint magical resonance here," she said. Her hands moved through another sensing pattern. "I can't classify it. It's not artificial—not a spell or enchantment. Something natural, but not anything I've encountered in Brotherhood training."
The warm stone. The thing Brac won't explain and I've been avoiding.
"I have a notation on that section," I said. "I've been leaving it alone."
She looked at me. Her eyes were sharp, assessing—not suspicious, but curious in a way that felt different from her earlier investigation.
"That is not an engineer's answer," she said.
"No."
We stood in the tunnel for a moment, both of us aware that I had acknowledged something without explaining it. The warm stone pulsed faintly at the edge of my SEG perception—the same unclassified anomaly it had been since Brac's warning.
"Some things I defer to people who understand them better than I do," I said finally. "The dwarves have protocols for this kind of feature. I follow the protocols."
"Even without understanding why."
"Especially without understanding why. The protocols exist because someone learned something the hard way. I'd rather benefit from their experience than repeat their mistakes."
Triss didn't respond. But something in her expression shifted—a recognition, perhaps, that I was being honest about the limits of my own knowledge.
We continued the survey in silence.
That evening, Triss sat at the planning room table and drafted her first Brotherhood report.
I was working at the other end of the table—the elven governance proposal I'd been developing since Aedh's arrival, the integration metrics I needed to present to Caelin before the next planning meeting. Close enough to see what she was doing, but far enough that I wasn't obviously watching.
She wrote steadily for perhaps an hour. Then she stopped, read what she'd written, and read it again.
The word "inexplicable" appeared three times in the portion I could see from my angle.
She folded the document, placed it in her pack, and didn't send it.
I watched her do this. She knew I was watching. Neither of us spoke.
The planning room was quieter with two people in it than it had been with one—the particular silence of two people working on problems that didn't require conversation, aware of each other's presence without needing to acknowledge it.
She's choosing not to file. Not because she's hiding something—because she doesn't know how to explain what she's found.
The same problem I would have if anyone asked me to explain the system.
The investigation was still technically active. The Brotherhood clock was still running. But something had shifted from investigation to collaboration, and neither of us had named what that shift was.
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