Four percent. She had told me four percent, out loud, in front of two other women, and I was starting to suspect the number was a courtesy.
"Ms. Reyes."
Petra’s voice, and it had lost some of the policy-recitation flatness. Odette turned her head.
"You’re taking my proposal and improving it," Petra said. "That is fine. That is what I hoped would happen when I opened it. But you have removed the part that mattered to me, and I would like it back."
"Which part."
"The part where I am a signatory."
Diane made a small sound.
"Honey," she said, "no."
"Ms. Fitzgerald, with respect, this does not require your consent."
"It requires more than my consent, it requires you to have thought about it for longer than four days." Diane turned in her chair to face her fully, and there is a version of Diane Fitzgerald that is professionally warm and there is a version that is just warm, and this was the second one, which made it considerably worse. "You put your name on that instrument as a signatory and you are personally attached to his registration for the length of your career. Not your family’s name. Yours. Every performance review, every ranking board, every journalist with a slow news week. If he turns out to be exactly what he says he is, nobody remembers you signed. If he turns out to be anything else, that document is the first thing anybody finds, and you’ll be twenty-six years old explaining it in a room where nobody in it likes you."
"I’m aware."
"You’re nineteen."
"I am eighteen, and I have been aware of exactly how much my name is worth since I was nine years old, which is a thing you cannot say about yourself at that age and I do not resent you for it." Petra’s ears had gone completely red and her voice had not moved at all, which was frankly an impressive piece of engineering. "My mother’s name is on eleven federal contracts. Mine is on nothing. I have won one election by one vote and I have never made a single decision that would have gone differently if I had not existed."
Nobody said anything.
I have watched Petra Lang for three weeks. I have watched her descend a staircase like the room was rented for her, and correct Maribelle’s hemline every morning with the reliability of a public utility, and generate a crystalline arsenal that orbited her head while she looked at all twenty of us like we were furniture arriving late. I had her filed under one thing and the file was wrong, and it had been wrong since the second she said saving lives is the job in the top row of Room 214 and did not gloat about being right.
"That’s a hell of a thing to say out loud," Diane said quietly.
"I have found that saying things out loud is how they become other people’s problem." Petra opened the second folio, and there was a second sheet in it, and her handwriting was on it. "I drafted mine Wednesday night as well."
Odette laughed.
One syllable, low, entirely genuine, and it changed her whole face for about a second and a half. Then she put it away and reached across the table and took Petra’s page and read it, and her pen came out, and she made three marks and turned it around.
"Your indemnity language is decorative," she said. "That clause protects nobody. This one exposes your father’s legal department to a discovery request. That one is fine. Rewrite the first two and I’ll countersign as agency of record."
Petra took the page back with both hands.
She did not smile. She did something considerably harder to look at, which was hold absolutely still while her eyes went bright and then get them under control inside of two seconds.
〘 Petra Lang: 26% → 34% 〙
〘 Note: Subject has been corrected professionally by a woman she respects, in front of you, and the correction was affirming rather than dismissive. This is the first documented instance in her recorded history. 〙
〘 Advisory: You did not cause this. You are, however, standing where it happened, and she will remember the room. 〙
I dismissed it, and I did not feel good about it, and I filed that too.
"All right," Diane said. "Now we negotiate the audit."
They went at it for twenty-two minutes.
I am not going to pretend I followed every move. I grew up in Diane’s house, which means I have absorbed enough contract structure to know when somebody is being skinned, but this was two people who had done it professionally to each other before, and half of it happened in a shorthand that assumed the other party had read the same three cases.
Diane conceded the floor access and took payment for it in four separate places. Odette could stand on the floor, and she could see the trauma sensor feed, and she could not see the individual Aspect output telemetry. She could take notes and she could not photograph a screen. Anything she wrote down became reviewable by Fitzgerald Media inside seventy-two hours, and any language that left the Lang Agency about me passed across Diane’s desk before it passed across anybody else’s.
Odette took most of it and killed one clause outright.
"No," she said. "I’m not giving you veto over my internal assessment. You’ll have review. You won’t have edit."
"Then I want a nondisclosure with teeth."
"You’ll get one with teeth. You will not get one with jurisdiction, because I am not signing anything that lets you drag Margot Lang into a California court over a boy who hasn’t got a license." Odette’s pen stopped. "Diane. I’m on his side of this. You’ve decided I’m not, because you’ve decided nobody is except you, and that is a very effective way to run an agency and a completely exhausting way to raise a child."
The temperature changed again.
Diane looked at her for a long moment, and the professional pleasantness stayed exactly where it was on her face, and underneath it something moved.
"You don’t get to say that to me."