Sela Venn was a Neon Synapse engineer on the Gilded Expansion, the colleague and friend of chief engineer Tovan Rheel, and afterwards the person who made the Gilded Coven account for what it owed the workers it had sent west.
She was short and horned, two dark ridged sweeps of bone curving back from her temples with her ears coming to a point beneath them, and she drew stares along every road the expansion marched down. She had stopped noticing them long before. She was irreverent, warm and practical — she marched west eating roasted nuts from a roadside merchant and teasing Tovan about his machines — and she had no patience for a human cost dressed up as a technical problem.
That was her value. Where Tovan calculated, she said the obvious thing out loud: that exhausted crews would make mistakes, that half-measures were half-measures, that he always found something to do just smaller than what he ought to do. She said it to his face, regretted it, and did not take it back. She was at Thalenor Root when the drilling turned to killing, and stayed with the dying.
What she became afterwards was an accountant, which she had always hated. In the demobilization camps, where Gilded clerks found reasons to delay every injury claim and unpaid wage, she began collecting paper: contracts set against payroll slips, duplicated deductions, unexplained penalties, sites recorded as voluntarily abandoned where crews had in fact fled for their lives. Notebooks became boxes. Together with Tovan’s private archive, her records gave the Synapse workers proof of what they were owed, and fed the long grievance they came to call the Abandonment.
By the end she worked out of a supply tent where the tables had vanished under contracts, passing each page on to the next worker with the clause already marked.