Gnomon: one who knows, on a mission to kill the other narrative strands using the Chamber of Isis as a doorway. The mission itself is enough to imply the collapse of Hunter’s separate stories into one another, the reintegration of her self. Not subtle, but maybe that’s the point. Hunter is subtle. Perhaps Smith reckoned to shock-and-awe his way through her maze. And it worked, at least in the first instance. Neith will swear that was the real woman under it all, even if only for a moment, before she dropped into some even lower, more unthinkable level of concealment, yielding all but the most fundamental parts of her cognitive architecture to the machine and hiding in those layers of her internal ocean beyond the reach of daylight.