She turned to the draft of the safety protocol document open on her desk, 14 pages, triple reviewed, with Caleb's annotations in the margins in a handwriting that was small and precise and unscentimental. She read through his notes the way she'd read his maintenance reports. The same quality of mind, the same economy of language, no word in there that wasn't doing work. She picked up a pen and started writing. The afternoon light moved across the desk, and the city made its ordinary sounds outside, and somewhere in a school on the west side of town, a girl with slightly uneven braids was explaining wind resistance to a teacher who had no idea what she was in for.
The work continued. It was Sloan was beginning to understand, always going to continue, not because it had no end point, but because the end point kept revealing itself to be farther out than she'd originally calculated. and she was learning slowly to find that fact less frustrating and more like the truth of how things that mattered actually worked. She wrote until the light changed. Then she saved the document and went down to the hangar because she had gotten into the habit of ending her days there among the people and the machines and the smell of oil and metal that she was beginning to understand was not the smell of her company's infrastructure but of its actual heartbeat. The evening crew was coming on.
She knew most of their names. The science fair was held on a Thursday evening in the gymnasium of Mia's school, which smelled like floor wax and the particular institutional cleaner that school gymnasiums have smelled like everywhere since approximately 1970 and will probably continue to smell like until the end of time. The tables were arranged in rows, each one holding a project with a trifold display board and a child standing beside it with the specific nervous energy of someone who has rehearsed their explanation 40 times and is now uncertain whether 40 was enough. Sloan arrived 7 minutes late because she had been in a call with a parts supplier that ran over, and she walked in still in her workclo, the charcoal blazer, the heels that made noise on hard floors, and immediately felt the particular social displacement of being overdressed for a school gymnasium. Several parents looked at her with the mild curiosity reserved for unfamiliar faces.
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.