Four days later

    30,000 feet above sea level

"What is this about?"

"The notebook."

It's been almost a week. Alexandria has two jobs, both of them in active disaster recovery mode. She can't remember the last time she had an unbroken hour to herself. So it takes her a moment or two to remember the thing Legend is talking about.

"You dragged me all the way up here to talk about that?"

He's been better than Eidolon at pretending not to be avoiding her, which is ironic, but he was still doing that, so this is out of character. He's tense, but he's not worried, and is notably more happy to see her than he was the last few times they met face to face—which is to say still quite displeased, which grates more than she'd think—

So this is good but possibly urgent news. But all these observations don't align with the other facts of reality. It can't be simply that they caught whoever did it.

He shrugs.

It stings; that she never thought he was worth her time, not really, not more than the same act she put up for everyone else—

—but even more, somehow, that with the truth out, she doesn't even think the act is worth it anymore.

"There are eyes and ears everywhere."

Full cover protocol, now? After everything?

"What about the notebook?"

"You haven't read your email."

There's none of the humor he used to put in the words.

"I prioritize," she says coldly.

She regrets it as soon as she says it. Legend didn't mean the snub, not really. But she did hers, and she brought his attention to it, and now he'll be going back over his words, poisoning them to mean more than he meant at the time.

"Sorry," she says, retreating, but it's too late.

Her act of contrition doesn't work on him anymore.

"Watchdog ran a full character evaluation panel on it. The notebook, I mean. Then an impact projection. Strongly green across the board, the highest we've seen in... ever, arguably. Higher than Uppercrust, comparable with Dragon, but negligible downside risk."

What.

"Who approved that?" in lieu of anything better to say.

"Is that what you're concerned about?"

"Watchdog has seven black priority crises on their hands as we speak. We don't—"

"The think tank fast-tracked it. It was fogging up their other work."

Contessa.

Things are abruptly much clearer and much more confusing at the same time.

The notebook is a blind spot. If it's throwing Contessa, but enough Thinkers have a good read on it to develop any rating reasonably described as "low-variance"—

"Has anyone called Dinah Alcott?"

(There are two types of Thinker blind spot.

We have what scholars call "programmed" blind spots: arbitrary blocks generally affecting most or all Thinkers, characterized by being possible to circumvent to varying extents by indirection or abstract modelling. To all appearances, they appear to operate by directly preventing parahuman powers from interacting with them. Scion and the Endbringers are considered programmed blind spots. Doctor Mother believes them to be placed by Scion or its partner to attenuate humanity's potential threat to them.

Then there are behavioral blind spots: phenomena which most theorize are genuinely difficult to model, blind spots which are impossible to cheat with clever sideways-thinking tricks, and which only affect a cross-section of parahumans whose powers happen to couple with the particular dimension of unpredictability. Behavioral blind spots tend to affect precognitives more often and more strongly, because even subtly incorrect predictions propagate fast. Eidolon, trigger events, most precognitives to a weak extent, and certain dimensional phenomena are behavioral blind spots.

To a first approximation, Cauldron thinks of programmed blind spots as bad: they present as a specific adverse design against humanity, and history has not proven that interpretation wrong. Behavioral blind spots, in contrast, they consider good: weapons which Scion itself cannot predict are weapons humanity can wield to free itself of its prophecied fate.

If the notebook blinded Contessa, but was broadly legible to the character panel, it's almost certainly a behavioral blind spot.)

(But while behavioral blind spots tend to hit precognitives hard, but not all precognitives are created equal.

Errors propagate, but not all precognition operates on propagation. There are simulational precogs, which function as it sounds; and then there are oracular precogs—"true" precognitives, some call them. Powers which peer into the moving foam of time to divine the real, physical future. While they're not wholly unaffected, they still work; they become less precise, not less accurate. And that makes all the difference.

The downside is that, for whatever reason, oracular precogs tend to be much vaguer and less targetable, if not downright weaker, than simulational precogs. The archetypical Thinkers who answer in questions "orange" and "purple", or who paint prophetic visions in fugues of madness? Oracles. Consolidated by expert matchmakers into WEDGDG think tanks, they become a source of considerable predictive power. These form the impact analysis panels. Nonetheless, even the aggregate results remain terribly fuzzy.

Dinah Alcott is not the typical oracle.

Dinah Alcott does not currently work for WEDGDG or any of its affiliate organizations.)

He doesn't know what she's thinking. She caught the code, but he doesn't know if she's getting the same things out of it as he did. Being around Alexandra always made him feel stupid. It used to be vaguely reassuring, if demeaning. Then it made him wary. Now it feels like nothing.

"Read the report first," is all he says.

"Obviously."

Rebecca clocks out of patrol and doesn't clock back in at the head office. She goes to her Downtown apartment she hasn't been to in months, opens her work laptop, and starts reading.

She studies the think tank report. She paces. Then she reads more. She reviews the interrogation transcripts. She pulls up the personnel files of everyone who handled the object and everyone on the character and impact panels, digging for any flaw. She watches the security footage of the day it appeared, trying to recapture her exact state of mind when she first found the notebook. She studies the physical analyses of the object and reads fifteen papers and only manages to confuse herself more. She waits an hour turning the pieces around in her mind to make sure she's not missing anything.

Then she authorizes a transaction from her personal bank account and makes a call.

It takes forty seconds for the other end to pick up.

"That'll be another hundred thousand for making this a phone call instead of an email."

There's a faint strain in her voice. It's only two in the afternoon on the East Coast.

She enters another payment instruction.

"Done," she says.

She can't take it with her when she goes. A cheap price for a drop of favor.

"I'm Chief Director Costa-Brown of the PRT."

"You have two questions."