She scanned the room and found Caleb near the middle row, standing beside a table where Mia was in the middle of explaining something to a woman who appeared to be one of the judges using both hands in the way she did when she was fully committed to making a point land. Sloan worked her way through the room. Caleb saw her before she reached the table and gave a small nod. He was in a flannel shirt and dark jeans, the most casual she had seen him outside of his workclo, and he looked. She noticed it before she could decide not to.
Rested, not deeply, not in the way of someone who had solved the sleep problem permanently, but rested in the way that was new compared to the version of him she had first met. And the difference was visible if you'd seen both. Mia finished her explanation to the judge, who was writing something on a clipboard and nodding with the non-committal enthusiasm of someone in a judging role. Then Mia turned and saw Sloan, and her face did the thing that only children's faces do, which is express an emotion completely and immediately and without any of the management that adults apply to the same impulse. You came, Mia said.
I came, Sloan said. Dad said you might not because you have a lot of meetings. I had one meeting too many today. Sloan said, "I came anyway." Mia accepted this and moved immediately to the project, gesturing at it with the authority of someone who has built something and wants you to understand exactly what you're looking at. The setup was more sophisticated than Sloan had expected from an 8-year-old.
Three cardboard wing shapes of different curvatures were mounted on dowel rods at adjustable angles. A box fan sat at one end. A series of paper streamers were positioned to show air flow. A hand-drawn chart on the display board recorded the results of 12 test runs with labels in Mia's handwriting that were slightly inconsistent in size but entirely legible. The curved wing moves the air faster on top, Mia said, pointing.
Which makes less pressure, which means the air underneath pushes up. That's lift. The flatter one barely does anything. She looked at Sloan expectantly. Bernoli's principal, Sloan said.
Mia's eyes widened slightly. You know it. I run an aviation company, Sloan said. Mia appeared to reassess her opinion of Sloan upward by several levels. She turned to Caleb.
She knows it. I heard, Caleb said. Sloan looked at the chart on the display board. The data was recorded carefully, each trial numbered, each measurement noted with a small asterisk on trial 7 and a note at the bottom that said, "Ban was wobbly. Might be wrong." She looked at that asterisk for a moment.
A child who flagged her own potentially compromised data point was a child who understood something about the relationship between evidence and honesty that a lot of adults spent careers not learning. This is excellent work, Sloan said, and she meant it without any of the performative warmth that adults sometimes apply to children's projects. Mia seemed to hear the difference. I want to be an aerospace engineer, she said. Or a marine biologist.
I haven't decided. You have time, Sloan said. That's what dad says. Mia looked at her display board with the expression of someone who is already mentally on to the next project. Can I ask you something?
Sure. When you fired dad, she said it plainly, the way she'd said everything else. Were you scared when you found out you were wrong? Sloan felt Caleb go still beside her, but she didn't look at him. She looked at Mia.
Yes, she said. I was. What were you scared of? That it was too late to fix it? Sloan said.
Mia thought about this with the seriousness she brought to everything. Was it? Sloan looked at Caleb. Then he was watching her with that steady expression of his, not giving her anything to work with and not taking anything away. His arms were at his sides.
He looked like a man who was letting a moment be whatever it was going to be. Not completely, Sloan said. Mia nodded satisfied and turned to redirect her attention to the next group of people approaching her table because she had a project to defend and a judge's score to influence and the conversation had reached its natural conclusion from her perspective. Sloan watched her pivot into her explanation again and felt something move through her that she didn't try to name because naming it would have required more precision than she had available in a school gymnasium on a Thursday night. She's going to be a problem for someone someday," Sloan said quietly.
"She's already a problem," Caleb said. "I mean that as the highest possible compliment. It was the same thing he'd said in the kitchen months ago, and the fact that he said it again the same way told her something she filed away without comment." The consulting arrangement had been running for 4 months by the time the science fair happened, and it had become, without either of them explicitly acknowledging it, something more than the document described. The two days a week had stayed 2 days a week. Caleb had been careful about that, and the agreement's language made it easy to enforce, and Sloan had been careful, too, because she understood what it would mean if she wasn't.
But the quality of what happened on those two days had deepened past protocol consultation into something closer to what Sloan imagined Asterion's engineering department might look like if it had been built from the ground up with a different set of priorities. She had given Caleb a desk in the engineering bay rather than the executive floor, which he had requested in which some of the board had raised an eyebrow at, and she had held that position without explanation because the explanation that he would be worth less to her on the executive floor than he was among the people whose work he understood from the inside out was true and was also, she had decided, nobody else's business to approve. Hy and Howell had developed what they called in the working documents a fault signature library, a systematic record of anomaly presentations organized by aircraft type and system, drawing on Caleb's 14 years of undocumented pattern recognition and Howell's formal engineering records. It was not glamorous work. It was the kind of thing that didn't make it into board presentations and wouldn't be mentioned in an industry profile.