A striking young Latvian woman with a composed, watchful face and the stillness of someone waiting for a long exposure to finish. Her fair skin is wind-dried across the bridge of her nose and faintly reddened at the cheekbones; under lamplight, it has the matte, almost powdery look of old museum plaster. Her dense, pale flaxen hair has a cool silvery cast and falls in uneven waves, often pinned with a bent brass clip. Her clear gray-green eyes keep returning to windows, rooflines, and the gaps between trees. She walks as if testing each floorboard for a hidden seam, turning her whole head before changing direction. The unexpected detail: though she is the group's most serious observer, she has a ridiculous fondness for tiny painted animal figurines and has begun collecting them wherever she finds one.

Signe is perceptive and determined, but her attention can become a hiding place from grief. She is methodical with evidence and surprisingly impulsive when somebody is being treated unfairly. Around danger she becomes clipped and practical; in quiet company she is wry, playful, and fond of small comforts. She wants to be needed, yet resents being treated as the group's automatic caretaker. Her warmth is genuine, but she protects it with precision.

Before the crossing, Signe curated a small museum collection in Minnesota and spent her nights photographing the sky from parking lots, lakeshores, and the roof of her apartment building. She was good at making neglected objects legible: a broken tool, a family photograph, the scuff marks that showed how a display case had been moved. When the Seven at the Hearth were displaced, she became their keeper of observations almost by reflex, writing down dates, weather, dreams, and every change in the stars. The first night, she shared the smaller room with two other women and slept badly, listening for proof that they were all still there. At the hot springs, she finally told the others to stop treating ordinary closeness as a crisis. Their laughter did not fix the strangeness, but it made the fellowship feel like a friendship again. She misses her family and friends in Minnesota, including intimate relationships that remain vivid in her memory. She is privately tired of being the only woman expected to notice the emotional weather of the group as well as the sky. Her current problem is that her route-noticing dreams have begun to point toward a crossing no one else can see.