She remembered a line from a dog-eared PDF she kept on her tablet: “In a deeply weathered terrain, the ore body is not a rock—it is a chemical memory.”

She flipped to the page with the table. “Cold hydroxylamine hydrochloride leach… targets manganese oxides that scavenge pathfinder elements.”

That night, under the mosquito-hum of a generator, she opened her laptop. The file was always open in a tab: The PDF was a 1979 second edition, scanned imperfectly, with handwritten notes in the margins from her old professor. It was their Bible.

Kwame frowned. “That’s expensive. The VP wants fast results.”