Odette turned the page.
"Ms. Lang’s proposal is structurally sound and commercially naive," she said. "I’m going to fix both halves of that sentence, and then Diane is going to try to kill the version I produce, and we’ll meet somewhere in the middle where nobody is happy. That’s the meeting. I’d like everyone to understand the shape of it before we spend forty minutes discovering it."
"Sugar, I love a woman who narrates the ambush."
"You taught me to."
"I taught you to hold the folio flat so nobody reads your margins. The ambush is yours." Diane leaned back and crossed one ankle over the other, and if you did not know her you would have thought she had relaxed. "Go on then."
Odette produced a single sheet from the back of the folio and slid it across the table, and she slid it to me. Not to Diane. Not to Petra. She put it in front of the eighteen-year-old with the collar he had ruined an hour ago, and I watched Diane’s jaw do something very small.
The heading read LETTER OF DEVELOPMENTAL INTEREST, NON-EXCLUSIVE, and the body was four paragraphs long.
"I drafted that Wednesday night," Odette said. "Before Ms. Lang made her speech. I want that on the record, because in six months she’s going to tell her mother she negotiated this outcome, and I’d like at least one person at this table to know the truth."
Petra’s chin came up about a centimeter.
"Then you were already prepared to attach the name," she said.
"I was already prepared to attach the name if the boy could speak in complete sentences under pressure. He can. That was the entire test, Petra. The registration was never the point." Odette put her glasses back on. "The registration is the excuse the industry uses to have a look at somebody. I came here to find out whether there was a person behind the interview clip or a well-managed asset, and Diane has enough clients that the second option was more likely."
"You could have just asked."
"I did ask. He told me he doesn’t know when he stopped being Unmarked and that he trains like it’s going to be taken away." Odette’s mouth moved a fraction, and it was not a smile so much as a place where a smile had once been. "That is an answer nobody coaches. Diane coaches sincerity. She does not coach fear, and she certainly does not coach a candidate to admit to it in front of an agency."
Which was accurate, and I was in the process of enjoying being accurately described when I realized what she had actually said.
She had not believed a single thing my file told her, and she had come anyway, and she had drafted the paper before she arrived.
I have been in a lot of rooms in two lifetimes and I have never once been the least prepared person in one. The novelty was not enjoyable. It was clarifying, which is worse.
I read the letter.
Non-exclusive. No diagnostic reporting. No equipment placement, no likeness rights, no first-refusal clause on representation. The Lang name appeared exactly twice, once in the header and once in a line that said the undersigned agency expresses developmental interest in the candidate’s progression and considers the candidate’s current classification consistent with observed developmental variance.
That last phrase did the whole job. Consistent with observed developmental variance. If Lang Agency had looked at my file and concluded my classification was consistent, then no regional office in California was going to volunteer to disagree with Margot Lang’s staff in writing.
Petra had asked for a shield. Odette had built one out of a sentence.
"What do you want," I said.
"Two things." She held up nothing, which I appreciated. "First. I attend the Crucible in two weeks as a credentialed observer. Not in the gallery with the scouts. On the floor, with the faculty, with access to the trauma sensor feeds in real time."
Diane’s coffee cup came down. "No."
"Diane."
"I said no, and I’m going to keep sayin’ it in a nice voice until you hear it. You want to stand on the floor of a live multi-environment exercise watching a first-year’s numbers come in raw, unfiltered, with no lag and nobody between you and the readout." The drawl had gone long and slow, which is the sound Diane Fitzgerald makes right before somebody’s quarter goes badly. "That’s not observation. That’s an audit with better catering."
"It’s an audit," Odette agreed. "I’ve never pretended otherwise. The alternative is that I go home with six pages and a favorable impression, and in eleven months a licensed Hero files an incident report that quantifies him accurately, and then Margot asks me why I signed a letter of interest for a candidate I never watched work. I would like to survive that conversation."
"And the second thing?"
Odette looked at me.
"One honest answer per meeting," she said. "Not a true one. Diane has taught you to be technically true, and you’re already better at it than most of my Rank B talent. I want honest. If I ask you something and the honest answer is that you can’t tell me, you say that. Out loud. In those words."
The room got very quiet, and I became aware of Petra’s pen resting exactly parallel to her planner and Diane’s thumb moving once across the leather of her portfolio and the specific hum of a building that has been air-conditioned to sixty-eight degrees since seven in the morning.
Because that second condition was the actual price, and Diane knew it, and Odette knew Diane knew it.
A man who says I can’t tell you has confirmed there is a thing.
"He’s eighteen," Diane said.
"He gave a nationally broadcast interview on message discipline you would charge a client nine thousand dollars for. Stop selling me the child." Odette folded her hands. "I’m not asking him to incriminate himself. I’m asking him to stop performing at me. I’ve spent nineteen years in rooms with people performing at me and I am extremely tired, and he is the first candidate in four cycles who has done anything that made me want to be in this building on a Friday."