Odile Ferrant (Human, boundary officer, Survey Corps)

Ferrant had the handheld's feed on the junction screen, because it was her instrument and she had asked for it, and she watched the whole of it standing at the edge of the light with her hands empty, which was how she had decided to watch it.

Two shapes on the line. One with the texture of fur in the light and a thermal return she would have called an adult of the population on the file without being asked. One with an optical return, a rim where the lamp bent round it, and on the thermal channel, where the shape stood, the temperature of the silt.

She had read that page for a living for nine years and she had never once seen it stand next to something warm. The documented cases stood in corridors, on observation decks, at three in the morning in front of a watch officer with nothing to compare them to. This one stood on a line of silt beside a person, in a lamp held by another person, and the lamp went onto the one and round the other, and the difference was not an instrument reading. It was a thing a child could have seen.

Aravena knelt. Ferrant watched the stone go down a hand from the warm one's feet, and watched the frame hold, and watched the warm one bend, and felt the answer come up through the floor of the junction into her boots, the way she had felt it once before and would not, she thought, ever stop being surprised by.

The other one did not move. Not a frame.

Then Aravena turned, and the handheld turned with Aravena, and the last frames before the lamp went into the crack showed both of them still on the line, the warm one standing in its place and the other an arm's length beside it, in a light the handheld could just work by, that had no source and threw no shadow.

Ferrant did not say anything. Nakagawa did not say anything. Egede, for once, did not either.

What Ferrant was thinking, and would write in her own file and nowhere else, was this. Her grade did not change. A direct observation is better than an inference and the page she read for a living said exactly what the handheld had seen, and the grade she had filed already allowed for that, because she had filed it honestly. What had changed was not the grade. It was that she now knew, from a lamp, the thing the gravimeter and the imager and the page had all told her and none of them had made her feel: that it stood beside. Not in the people's place, not in the party's. Beside both, on the one line both had agreed to keep, asked by neither, answering neither.

She had a word for what it was consistent with. She did not have a word for that.