Android had run a layered scan—visible, infrared, something else she didn’t bother naming—and one of the composite overlays was still ghosted on a nearby screen.
Not the image itself, but a fragment of the underdrawing lifted and isolated.
Most of it was noise to anyone else.
But Gosie saw a mark. Not part of the composition—too deliberate, too tucked away.
A tiny cartographic flourish, the sort of thing an artist might use as a private anchor. A habit.
She’d seen it before.
Not in a catalogue. In a place.
She stepped closer, adjusted the contrast herself, and there it was—clear enough:
A stylised headland. Three lines. One break.
Not decorative. Locational.
West coast again, but further north than Ardnamurchan. More exposed. Fewer houses. The kind of place where things get put out of sight rather than on display.
She didn’t explain it to Android. Just said, “You’ve got the wrong question,” and picked up her keys.
By late afternoon she was on the road again, pushing past the familiar routes and out towards Sutherland—proper edge-of-the-map territory.
The location resolved itself as she drove: a narrow inlet near Lochinver, where the land folds in on itself and old buildings sit low against the weather.
Not a house this time.
A boathouse.
Stone. Locked, but not recently. The sort of place used intermittently, deliberately forgotten in between.
She didn’t force entry. The key was where it always is in places like this—somewhere obvious if you understand how people think when they believe no one is looking.
Inside: salt, timber, rope… and one object that didn’t belong.
A crate.
Not old. Not local. Travelled.
She opened it.
Not a painting.
Fragments.
Panels—cut, separated, each one carrying part of an image. Not damaged—divided.
As if someone had taken a single work and broken it into components for transport, or concealment, or… study.
And here’s the problem:
One section matched the underdrawing from Android’s anomaly.
Which means the “impossible” painting in the lab isn’t original.
It’s assembled knowledge.
Someone has been collecting pieces—literally—and reconstructing something they shouldn’t be able to reconstruct.
Gosie stood there a long moment, then closed the crate exactly as she’d found it.
She didn’t take anything.
But now she knows the adversary’s method.
They’re not chasing finished works.
They’re building one.
And they’ve already been here.