I'm sitting here, aren't I? That's not what I mean. I mean the fault, the report. Somebody needs to know that aircraft was a serious problem before you fixed it and that you fixed it alone without being asked on your own time. Caleb wrapped both hands around his coffee cup.
The reports in the system. I documented everything before I went to sleep. It's all there. And if they bury it, they won't. Caleb said it was the first time that morning he'd sounded tired.
Not physically, the other kind. It's too big to bury. If it comes out later that they had a priority 1 hydraulic fault and didn't disclose the circumstances, they've got liability problems that make a wrongful termination look like a parking ticket. They're not that stupid. Garrett looked at him.
You sure about that? Caleb thought about it honestly. Pretty sure, he said. Maybe 70%. 70% is not a number I love. I don't love it either, Caleb said.
But I've got work to do and Mia's got a science project due Friday and I'm not going to spend the week I have left before the school break in a lawyer's office. Not if I don't have to. Garrett accepted this though his expression said he wasn't entirely satisfied. He turned back to the carburetor. There's a Cessna 172 coming in Thursday that needs a full systems check.
Owner thinks it might be the alternator, but I'd put money on the voltage regulator. You interested? Yeah, Caleb said, "I'm interested. He finished the coffee and picked up a work order from the top of the stack on Garrett's bench and got started. The workshop smelled like oil and metal and old concrete, and it felt in its specific way like putting on a jacket that fit correctly.
He had not realized until that morning how much of his energy at Asterion had been spent managing the invisible weight of working inside an organization where his value was understood by almost no one with any authority. Here there was just the work and a man who knew the difference between someone who could actually do it and someone who couldn't. It was a smaller life in some ways. It felt for the first time in a while like his own. Sloan's Tuesday was punishing in the way Tuesdays had been punishing for most of her professional life, but with an additional layer that she couldn't quite shake.
She moved through back-to-back meetings with the precision of someone who had trained themselves to function at full capacity, regardless of what was happening internally. But every time there was a pause between agenda items in the elevator, standing at the window of the conference room while someone else was talking, she found her mind sliding back to the file to page four to 17 people. She also, though she was doing her best to manage this, kept thinking about the driveway, about the girl on the plastic crate with the uneven braids. She couldn't identify exactly why that image kept returning with such persistence. There was something in it that her mind wouldn't let go of.