Pomni

The smith in Heaven who builds the suit Matta wears to chase the Tear.

Where she works

Ch. 76 puts the heavens' engineering district somewhere between a workshop and a forge: "Massive crystalline structures hummed with energies that made Matta's fur stand on end, while beings of pure mathematics worked at stations that defied both physics and common sense."

Her own workbench is "made of crystallized time".

Who she is

Tall, "built like someone who'd spent eternity lifting things that technically shouldn't be liftable", with wings that are functional rather than decorative, and eyes "a shade of gold that seemed to contain actual starlight".

She mutters while working, "in what sounded like a combination of ancient Aramaic and quantum mathematics".

Her working relationship with Aquila

Weary, and it establishes that this is routine rather than exceptional.

AQL: Pomni! Got a customer for you! POM: Aki. What've you brought me this time? Please tell me it's not another 'minor adjustment' that requires rebuilding the fundamental constants of reality.

She calls Aquila Aki, which is what everybody in the heavens calls her.

What she builds

An upgrade to Matta's suit, to the specification "interdimensional pursuit at speeds that would make light jealous".

What the old suit did. "your current suit channels speed through bio-electrical enhancement. Functional, but limited."

What the new one does. It draws on the quantum foam directly, and the mechanism is borrowing rather than generating:

POM: These new pathways will let you borrow speed from versions of yourself across time. Every step you take [...] will be enhanced by the accumulated velocity of infinite possibilities.

The first step delivers exactly that. Matta becomes briefly aware of "infinite versions of herself - Mattas who had chosen different paths, different speeds, different destinies".

She has tested it on one person. The exchange is played as a joke and is not one:

AQL: Define normal. POM: Well, no one's died from it yet. AQL: How many people have tried it? POM: You're looking at her.

Her warning is the volume's actual subject, and the archive had it filed as a technical note:

POM: at those speeds, the line between motion and transformation becomes very thin. Don't lose yourself in the velocity.

Ch. 77 has the line blur on schedule: "the line between motion and transformation blurring into a single, continuous state of being". Aquila repeats the warning in her own words on the platform, which makes two people telling Matta the same thing in one chapter: "The question isn't whether you can catch it - it's whether you can hold onto yourself while doing it."

Ch. 77 also shows the one thing the suit cannot do: "The suit had no brakes for this kind of stop." The Tear halts dead, Matta cannot, and she overshoots by nearly three light-years, out through the far side of Andromeda.

The pronoun

Ch. 76 calls Pomni "she" throughout, and once calls her "he", in the line where Matta first uses the finished suit: "she immediately understood what he meant about consciousness stretching."

Recorded, not corrected. The chapters are kept as written.

Open questions

• What she is. Not named as human, monster, or one of the Fourteen.
• Whether the beings of pure mathematics working beside her are people.
• Whether she made anything else in the saga.
• What happened when she tested the suit on herself, which is the one experiment the saga mentions and never describes.