She was done. The room held for a moment and then began the gradual reconfiguration of a crowd that has received something and is deciding how to carry it. People shifted and moved and began the quiet conversations that would continue for the rest of the day in breakrooms and on the floor and in cars on the drive home. She could feel it starting the specific texture of a company that had just been handed something real and was beginning the slow process of deciding what to do with it. She walked toward the back of the room.
The crowd parted naturally, not from difference exactly, but from the simple physics of people making way. She reached Caleb and stopped in front of him. Up close, he looked the same as he always did, a little tired in the structural way, the kind that lived in a person and didn't fully leave. Garrett was watching her with his arms still crossed, his expression somewhere between neutral and something she couldn't read. Okay, Caleb said.
Okay, she said. You didn't read that off anything? No. He looked at the floor for a moment and then back at her. That was the right room, he said.
And the right people. I know, she said. Garrett made a sound that might have been agreement and might have been something else. She looked at Caleb steadily. I want to offer you something, she said.
And before I say what it is, I want you to know that it's not the same offer I made in your driveway. This is not reinstatement. He waited. I want to bring you in as a consulting technical adviser. She said, "Not a title, not an office, not a full-time position, unless that's ever what you want. specifically to help me build out what the maintenance review protocol should look like going forward.
The document I filed is a starting point. You've seen more fault signatures and more near-miss situations in this industry than most of the engineers on my full-time staff, and I need that knowledge in the room when we're building the permanent version of these policies. She paused. You tell me the hours. You tell me the terms.
I'm not asking you to come back to Asterion. I'm asking you to help me build the thing that Asterion should have been. Caleb was quiet for a long moment. The hours would need to be fixed and protected, he said. Not flexible.
Fixed because flexible means they expand. Fixed, she said, written into the agreement. And I need to be able to say no to something I think is wrong without it affecting the arrangement. That's the whole point of having you there, she said. He looked at Garrett.
Garrett shrugged, which appeared to communicate something specific in their language. 2 days a week is not 2 days a week until it is. Garrett said, "Make sure the paper says what you mean." "The paper will say what I mean," Sloan said. "I'll have legal draft it, and you can have whoever you want review it before you sign anything." Caleb looked back at her. "Let me think about it." "Of course.
And I want to bring Howell into the protocol development," he said. "He knows the fleet better than I do at this point. It should be both of us. She nodded. Done.
He looked at the hanger around them, the familiar space, the equipment, the morning light coming in through the open bay door at the far end. His face was doing something quiet and internal that she didn't try to interpret. He had spent 14 years in this building. Whatever he was feeling, looking at it now, was his to carry. "You should eat something," he said finally, which was not what she had expected.
She blinked. "What? You look like you've been running on nothing since 6:00 this morning, he said. There's a place two blocks north that does eggs. Garrett knows it.
Garrett uncrossed his arms for the first time since she'd approached them. "Best breakfast in the district," he said, with the absolute conviction of a man who had eaten there many times and was not speaking metaphorically. Sloan looked at both of them and understood that she was being offered something that was not technically about breakfast. "Okay," she said. "Okay," Caleb said.
They walked out through the side door into the April morning, the three of them. And the city was doing what cities do at 9:00 a.m. on a Friday when the weather has finally decided to cooperate, moving with purpose, generating its ordinary noise, carrying its ordinary weight. The trees on the street had that pale early green. A delivery truck idled at the corner. Somewhere nearby, a construction crew was running something loud.
Garrett led them north at a pace that suggested he had made this walk many times and had strong feelings about not rushing it. Caleb walked beside Sloan and didn't say anything for a half a block. Then Mia wants to know if you're coming to her science fair. Sloan looked at him. Excuse me.
She asked me last week if the loud shoes lady was coming to her science fair. He said his expression was carefully neutral, but something underneath it was not neutral at all. I told her I didn't know. She told me to find out. Sloan walked for a moment without answering.
When is it? 3 weeks. Thursday evening. She thought about her Thursday evenings and decided she did not currently care what was in her calendar on any of them. What's her project?
She built a model of how wind affects wing lift using a box fan and three cardboard shapes she cut out herself. He said it works. I've seen her run it 12 times. She knows about wing lift. She knows about everything.
Caleb said it's a significant problem. Garrett made a sound from slightly ahead of them that was unambiguously a laugh. Sloan walked in the April morning and thought about a girl in socks and pajama pants asking questions from a hallway and about uneven braids and about a man who had picked up his tools and walked out of a building with the particular dignity of someone who had decided long before that morning what he was worth and didn't need anyone else to confirm it. "Tell her I'll be there," Sloan said. Caleb nodded.