"I know. I said it anyway. That’s my one honest answer for the meeting." Odette turned to me, and her voice went back to level. "Your turn. I’ll ask you the question I actually came here to ask, and then we’ll all go have a productive weekend."
"Go ahead."
"You told Channel Seven that Heroes are symbols and that fear becomes hope when the right person arrives. That’s a Radiant line with your fingerprints on it and it tested extremely well, which you already know." She took her glasses off again, and without them her eyes were a dark, flat brown that did not blink enough. "I don’t care about the symbol. I’ve managed four of them. Every one of them was a wreck at thirty-one and two of them were dead at forty. So tell me the thing under it. Why number one. Not why Hero. Why the top."
Diane’s hand shifted on the table beside mine, the same fractional signal she had used forty minutes ago, and I ignored it for the second time in one afternoon.
"Because nobody argues with the guy at the top," I said.
Odette waited.
"That’s it," I said. "That’s the whole thing. I was in a state facility for six weeks when I was eight, and the walls were grey, and the cafeteria table had a wobble in it that nobody fixed, and there were three reserved parking spaces outside the window that were empty every single day I looked at them. Nobody in that building was expected to fix anything, so nothing in it got fixed, including us. Then Diane came in with the paperwork already signed and took me out, and I spent nine years in a guest room in a house where everybody was polite to me, and I want you to hear the specific word I’m using. Polite. Nine years of being an item on somebody’s list of good deeds."
"Lukas," Diane said.
"You asked her for honest, sugar. She’s getting it." I did not look at her, because I have limits. "So I’m not doing number one for the merch. I’m doing it because at number one nobody looks at your file first. Nobody reads three negative diagnostics and a two-year gap and decides what you are before you open your mouth. You walk into the room and the room adjusts. That’s what Radiant actually has. Everybody thinks it’s the strength."
Nobody moved for a second.
Odette Reyes sat back in her chair, and she looked at the ceiling for a moment like there was something written on it, and then she looked at me again.
"Your mother said something almost identical to me," she said. "At the regional intensive. Third day. I asked her how she got licensed with a mid-tier mobility Aspect and no legacy behind her and she said, and I remember this exactly, she said the trick is to become inconvenient to dismiss."
Something went through my chest sideways.
That is the problem with the eleven memories. They are real, they are in this body, and they belong to somebody who is not sitting in this chair, and every time a stranger hands me a new one I have to receive it with a face that says I already knew that, thank you, while the actual reaction happens somewhere I cannot get to.
"Yeah," I said. "That sounds like her."
"You said that an hour ago and I told you you wouldn’t know." Odette clicked her pen once, closed. "I’d like to withdraw that. It was unkind, it was accurate about the paperwork, and it was not accurate about you."
"You don’t have to withdraw it."
"I’m aware of what I have to do." She stood, and she did it in one motion without pushing off the table. "Diane. Send me the nondisclosure language by Monday. Petra, rewrite your first two clauses and send them to me directly, not through your mother’s office, and put your own name in the sender field. Lukas."
"Ms. Reyes."
"Odette."
"Odette."
"Two weeks. The Crucible." She put the folio under her arm. "I’m going to stand on that floor and watch you save people, and I am going to know within four minutes whether the file is wrong by a factor of two or a factor of ten. You should assume the second number, because I do, and I would like you to understand that I am not telling you this to threaten you. I’m telling you because you asked what I want, and what I want is to be in the room when somebody finally has to update your classification, and I’d prefer to be standing next to you when it happens instead of across from you."
She walked to the door.
"Walk me out," she said, without turning around.
Diane’s head came up.
"She’s got a class at three."
"He has forty-one minutes, and you know exactly what his schedule is, which is one of the two most alarming things about you." Odette opened the door. "Twelve minutes, Diane. You can time it."
I stood.
Diane caught my wrist as I passed her chair, and she did it fast and she did it lightly, and her thumb pressed once into the inside of my forearm where the pulse runs.
"Nothing," she said. "Not a word about the eleven days."
"I know."
"I mean it. She likes you now, and that is worse for us than when she didn’t."
"Diane." I let it sit for a second. "I know."
Her fingers stayed another half beat and then let go, and I felt her watching me all the way across the room, and I felt Petra watching me too, and Petra had not said a single word since Odette agreed to countersign, and her page was still in both hands.
The hallway outside the fourth floor conference room smelled like paint and printer toner and expensive perfume that was not Diane’s.
Odette walked four steps and stopped at the window that looks down over the quad, where the two o’clock crowd was breaking up and moving toward the Academic Spine in the flat white light.
"Your co-representative is in love with you," she said.
"She’s not."
"She signed her name onto a federal instrument to close an inquiry about a boy she has known for twenty-two days, and she drafted it at eleven at night while her brother was probably still on the phone with her father." Odette did not look away from the glass. "I’ve watched Margot Lang refuse to sign a birthday card. That girl has never done one impulsive thing in her life and she just did two in one week. I’m not asking you to do anything about it. I’m telling you because she won’t, and because you are apparently the only person in this building who has noticed she is a person, and if you handle it badly she will be extremely dangerous to you for approximately eleven years."
"That’s a specific number."
"That’s how long it took my sister." She turned around then, and she leaned back against the sill, and something about the angle of her shoulders was less agency and more woman who had been standing since six.
〘 Odette Reyes: 4% → 11% 〙
〘 Status: Assessing. Note: her assessment criteria have changed twice in the last forty minutes and she has not adjusted for that. 〙
"One more thing," she said, "and then I’ll let you go and you can pretend this part didn’t happen."