She pulled out her phone her own. Not Webs. A replacement that Ryes had arranged from someone's desk. And then she stopped and looked at it and put it back in her pocket. In a minute, she turned to face him in the lobby light ordinary.
Restored the main power having come back at 300 a.m. When the city grid was restored and Okaphor's team had confirmed the safe condition of the built systems. She looked different than she had in every other context of the night. Not diminished, not smaller, just human. In the specific way that a person looks human when they are no longer performing anything at all.
Her blazer was torn at the left shoulder seam. Her hair had come partly loose from wherever she'd started the evening. There was a small bruise forming at her right wrist that she hadn't mentioned and he hadn't asked about. She was 34 years old and she ran a company and she had just survived someone trying to end her life in the building. She'd spent 11 years building.
And she was standing in the lobby of that building at 3 in the morning looking at a man she had met 4 hours ago with an expression that was completely unguarded for the first time all night. I owe you something. She said, "No," he said. "You don't owe me anything. I was doing my job.
Your job is fixing transfer switches. My job is keeping a building running. " He said, "Tonight, the building happened to have people in it who needed to keep running, too. " She looked at him for a moment. "That's a very even keeled way to describe what you did tonight," she said. "I'm an even keeled person. You dropped from a ceiling onto a man who was potentially armed.
The torque wrench was on the desk. " He said, "He wasn't armed. You didn't know that when you dropped. He was quiet. " "No," he said. "I didn't. " She held his eyes. You have a daughter at home who needs you to come back, she said.
And you dropped from a ceiling. Yes. Why? He looked at her steadily. And the answer, the real answer, the one underneath the professional reflexes and the trained calm and the years of learned invisibility was simple and more honest than anything he'd said all night.
Because you were the only person in that room who was trying to do the right thing, he said. And I'm not built to stand by when that's happening. Something moved through Victoria Hayes's face that he had not seen there before. Not gratitude, not professional appreciation. Something older and more personal than either of those.
Something that a woman feels when she has been alone in every room she has won and then stands ocross from a man who without title, without status, without anything to gain chose her. She didn't say anything for a long moment. Then she said, "Go home to Maya. " "Yeah," he said. "Get some sleep. " "You, too," she nodded. Pulled out her phone, started to dial.