The Resonance Lens Lamp oil smelled different when it burned low — thinner, sharper, the wick pulling at the last quarter-inch of fuel with a desperation that changed the quality of the light. Morri's office smelled like that now, at an hour when no office should have been occupied. The flame threw unsteady shadows across the field maps she had pinned to the desk with calibration weights, their edges curling where the pins didn't reach. She had been sitting here since three. Not working — not yet. Sitting with the survey document flat on the desk to her left and her own field coordinate log open to her right, the resonance lens between them like a referee waiting for the match to begin. The chalk residue on her fingers had dried to a fine powder that she could feel in the creases of her knuckles when she flexed her hands, which she had been doing periodically, the way someone tests a bruise to confirm it still hurts. The comparison had been waiting to be made for days. She had the data. She had the instruments. She had the professional competence to perform the overlay in her sleep. What she had also had, until tonight, was the ability to not perform it — to hold the survey document and her field log in separate hands, in separate contexts, and allow the space between them to remain unexamined. That space had felt, for a few days, like mercy. The contract amendment sat in her drawer. She did not need to look at it again. Its effective date — three days before her visit to Veldris — had settled into her understanding the way contamination settled into substrate: slowly, then completely, then as a permanent condition of the material. Someone had anticipated…