Yutten Turse in the style of Mikhail Vrubel, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  Yutten woke up with a feeling that she should go ahead with her plan. She went to work, said hi to everybody, then locked herself in her office.

  The normal thing for Diviners was to cast engrams sequentially – you finish one and then you set up another – but she knew that people working in other fields of magic sometimes had to do several things in parallel. For instance, it commonly happened that Evokers had to control bleeding while doing something else at the same time, such as keeping the heart beating.

  The difference was just that Diviners weren’t used to these kinds of operative situations, while Evokers prepared for them with intensive training.

  When she thought about it, it seemed useful to be able to run several surveillance engrams at the same time, for instance. Or to keep one such engram active while also digging up information at the same time.

  But when investigators needed to do several things at once, they would just team up. Having a team at your back was good for safety reasons, too, so maybe that was why no one had ever emphasized parallel casting skill to her. It seemed really useful to be able to just do everything on your own, though. Strange that her training never included this.

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  She tried it and failed. Tried again and failed again. It was really hard to focus on two engrams at the same time.

  She suspected that the whole thing got complicated by the fact that the second engram targeted the results space of the first. Or maybe evoks are just really clever?

  Really well trained, more like it. She continued working on it.

  It took her several hours to get the double engram off the ground. She used the second engram to identify the age of the information obtained in the first.

  Unsurprisingly, the three Glitter cases dated to the Glitter era. The invisible thing remained invisible – the second engram supplied no information about it. Should have expected as much, she thought. Same thing as with the archive.

  Back to square one. But she had learnt a new way of casting magic.

  She spent more time thinking. On her evening walk, it occurred to her that since the detection engram was invisible, it was hidden by obfuscation magic. That was obvious.

  So, two different fields of magic were involved: Divination and Abjuration. That meant there were two different engrams at work: a Diviner had set up the detection engram, and a Protector (Abjurer) had made it invisible.

  Possibly the detection engram was keeping an eye out both for Canardo and for itself. But it could not also keep an eye out for the obfuscation engram, could it? Logically, the detection engram would have to be prior to the obfuscation engram, assuming you could only obfuscate something that existed at the time of casting.

  But if it was prior to the obfuscation engram, that also meant – for the same reason, basically – it could not be focused on the obfuscation engram, which did not exist at the time of casting.

  If this was correct, it should be safe to Divine the obfuscation even if it was not safe to Divine the detection. She decided to sleep on it.