She was fairly sure most people couldn't. She finished her coffee and walked out into the main bay and began her morning the way she'd been beginning them for months now. not with a clipboard or an agenda, but with a slow circuit of the space, making eye contact, asking small questions, learning things that didn't appear on any report. The board met at the end of the month. Aldrich asked her, as predicted, whether the policy reforms were strategic or reactive. She said both.
The reactive part happened because something went wrong. The strategic part is what we're doing about the conditions that made it possible for something that wrong to happen for that long without anyone with authority knowing about it. Aldrich wrote something in his notebook. Carver said, "And you believe these reforms will show measurable results within what time frame? Some of them will show up in safety metrics within a year." Sloan said the important ones won't be measurable for three.
That's a long horizon. Carver said it is. Sloan agreed. But the alternative is treating this as a PR problem and fixing it at the surface. And I've seen what the surface looks like.
I know what's underneath it, and I'm not willing to leave it the way it is. The room was quiet for a moment. Then Carver said, "All right." And moved to the next item, and Sloan sat at the head of the table in the same chair she'd occupied for 6 years, and felt something she hadn't felt in that room before. Not confidence. She'd always had that.
Maybe too much of it. something more complicated, something that felt like being present in the actual situation rather than managing it from a safe distance. It was uncomfortable and it was real. And she was starting to understand that these two things were connected. Outside the windows of the conference room, the tarmac was gray under a March overcast, and the morning crew was moving equipment in the slow choreography she had spent months learning to read. She knew most of their names now.
She was still learning what that meant. Spring came to the city in the tentative way it always did in that part of the country. A few warm days followed by a cold snap that reminded everyone not to put their heavy coats away yet. Then another stretch of sun that finally by midappril seemed to mean something permanent. The trees along the street outside Asterion's main facility put out their leaves in the particular pale green that only lasts 2 weeks before deepening.
And the morning crew started propping the side door of the hanger open to let in the air which smelled like wet earth and engine exhaust. And on the right kind of morning, something almost like hope. Sloan noticed the door being propped open for the first time in her second month of early shift visits. She filed it away. Small things were starting to mean more to her than they used to.