"So alter Ione gets added to this project. She's a Nethysian and her brother has told her to keep quiet about it, and she knows he hates her but she doesn't know if he's lying about that. Then it immediately becomes clear that this warrants more resources than are currently pointed at it and she wants to be among the people who gets to stay very very badly and she decides that the thing to do is seduce Keltham in one minute and tries it.
What...else does that produce, what else is that alter Ione up to, how would that alter Ione address her error when she realized that actually being a Nethysian was fine and that she's not going to get discarded from the project as long as she can keep learning the math.