She didn't know what she felt in that moment. Anger was part of it. Humiliation, the grinding, nauseiating awareness of 40 witnesses and $400 million and a board of directors who were going to want a very detailed explanation. But underneath all of that, if she was honest with herself, and Victoria Harrington was eventually always honest with herself. Underneath all of that was something that felt almost like recognition, the kind that comes when you realize someone tried to warn you.
She came down from the observation area. She crossed the testing floor. She passed Richard without looking at him. She stopped in front of a young engineer named Patterson who was standing near the demonstration setup holding the technical manual for the RS7's balance system, a thick spiralbound document in a blue cover. She took it from his hands.
She didn't think about what she was about to do. That was not entirely true. She thought about it. She made a choice. And looking back on that moment later in the quiet of her office at 2 in the morning, she would understand that the choice she made was driven by a rage that had nowhere else to go and a certainty that she had been made to look like a fool and a deeply unfair need to make someone else carry that.
She took three steps toward Daniel and she threw the manual at him. It hit him in the chest with a flat hard sound and dropped to the floor. Read the manual first. Her voice cracked across the room like a whip. Before you come onto my floor and try to undermine a demonstration that my team has spent 18 months building, read the manual.
You think you know more than the engineers who designed this system. You think your notebook? She gestured at it with unconcealed contempt means something against 18 months of documented research. The room was silent. Not the polite silence of people being respectful.
The stunned absolute silence of people who have just witnessed something they weren't sure they were supposed to see. Daniel looked at her for a long moment. Then he bent down. He picked up the manual. He straightened.
He turned it over in his hands. He found the front cover. And with the kind of deliberate, unhurried attention that a man gives to something he knows very well, he brushed the dust off the cover with his palm and opened to the first page, the title page. He read it and then he turned it around and held it up so that Victoria could see what was printed there. She leaned forward slightly and she read it.
RS7 Rescue System Technical Operations and Architecture Manual lead system architect Daniel Brooks. The silence in the room changed character entirely. It went from stunned to something else, something heavier, something that filled the room from the floor to the ceiling and pressed against every person standing in it. Victoria stared at the page. She read the name again, and in that moment, standing in the middle of a disaster she hadn't seen coming, holding the ruin of a $400 million deal and the full weight of what she had just done, she felt something she had not felt in a very long time.
She felt small. Daniel lowered the manual. He set it carefully on the edge of the control console beside him. He looked at Victoria, not with anger, not with triumph, not with the righteous contempt that she probably deserved. He looked at her the way a man looks at something he has been waiting a long time to say.