"One more thing," she said, "and then I’ll let you go and you can pretend this part didn’t happen."
"You keep saying that like I’m going to be the one who pretends."
"You will. It’s the most efficient thing about you." She pushed off the sill, and the suit jacket settled back into whatever tailored architecture it had been built around, and she started down the hall without checking whether I was following, which was becoming a pattern with her. "Walk. Diane is counting."
The fourth floor administrative wing at Halloran has that specific institutional hush where the carpet is too good and the doors are too heavy and nobody who works there has ever raised their voice on purpose.
Our footsteps did not match. Hers landed clean and even, heel to floor, the rhythm of a woman who had figured out the load-bearing mechanics of her own body sometime in her twenties and never revisited the question.
Mine were quieter than they should have been, because a hundred Agility does that whether I want it to or not, and I made myself scuff the second step so I sounded like a person.
She noticed. Of course she noticed. She did not say anything about it, which was worse.
We took the stairs. Four flights, and she did them in heels at conversational pace without her breathing changing, and somewhere around the second landing I stopped mentally scoring the meeting and started noticing how tired I actually was.
That is the thing nobody tells you about running a lie at scale. The lie is easy. The lie takes one session, maybe two, to assemble correctly. You figure out what the other person needs to see and you give it to them clean, and if you do it right they don’t even notice the handoff.
The maintenance is what kills you. The version of yourself that you preassemble for every room you walk into has to stay upright for the entire length of the conversation, and you can’t let the seams show, and you definitely can’t let the exhaustion show, because exhaustion is readable and readable means questions and questions mean the file gets opened again by someone whose job is noticing when the file doesn’t add up.
I had been doing that for three weeks. Dravid’s class. Steele’s sessions. Percy sitting across from me in study hours with his notebooks out, processing something I had said two days ago that I barely remembered saying.
Radiant standing fifteen feet away during a capture exercise, watching me move in a way that made my shoulder blades itch, his eyes tracking for one point three seconds longer than a casual glance required.
And now a woman who knew my mother’s combat theory better than I ever would, standing in front of me on a landing with six pages under her arm that could dismantle everything I had built since the entrance exam, telling me to walk faster because Diane was counting and we were already thirty seconds behind schedule.
I was so tired.
Not physically. Stamina does not fail anymore. The exhaustion was somewhere else, in the part of my brain that had to stay alert and upright and performing competence for every single interaction, even the ones that should have been easy.
"You’ve gone quiet," she said, at the ground floor door. Her voice was level, observational, not concerned. "That’s new. You’ve talked for forty-three minutes straight."
"I’m conserving."
"For what."
"Three o’clock. Combat Theory seminar. Dravid’s going to make somebody demonstrate something in front of the entire lecture section, and if I look tired when I walk in he’ll pick me, because he thinks tired is when people stop performing capability and start doing whatever they actually know how to do." I pushed the door open for her. She walked through without acknowledging the gesture, which I had not expected her to acknowledge and which she did not need to. "He’s right about that, by the way. It’s annoying how right he is."
The afternoon hit us both at once. Halloran does that flat white California light off all that pale concrete, and the quad was thinning out, the two o’clock crowd already funneling toward the Academic Spine in loose clusters, blazers off, ties loosened, somebody’s laugh carrying across the fountain from thirty yards away.
Two first-years from 1-A looked at Odette and then looked at me and then looked at each other, and I watched a story get written in real time about a scout and a candidate and a private meeting, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it, so I filed it under things I would deal with when they became load-bearing.
"Your car’s in visitor," I said.
"North lot. You knew that before I told you."
"You parked at eleven fifty-eight and Diane parked at eleven fifty-three. She mentioned the Fournier suit before you sat down. She only does that when she’s already clocked the car it came out of."
Odette made a sound. It was not a laugh. It was one syllable of air through the nose, the noise a person makes when they have decided to enjoy something and have not decided to admit it.
We walked.
I put the charm on. Not the interview version, because she had already told me she could smell the interview version from a different building, and not the version I use on Felicity, which is mostly just letting her win. This was the other one. Lower. Slower. The one where you stop trying to be impressive and just let somebody see that you have been awake for a long time.
"Can I ask you something before you go be professional at me again?"
"You can ask. I reserve the right to bill Diane for the answer."
"Nineteen years managing symbols." I watched the fountain instead of her. "Four of them, you said. Two dead at forty. Why are you still doing it."
She took eight steps before she answered, and I counted them, and that told me the answer was real.
"Because somebody has to be in the car with them," she said. "That’s it. That’s the entire job. The public gets the poster and the agency gets the quarterlies and the kid gets a jacket with a crest on it, and at two in the morning after a bad call there is one person who picks up the phone, and it is never the sponsor and it is never the ranking board." She adjusted the folio under her arm. "I have been that person four times. It went badly twice. I do not have a better reason than that and I have stopped looking for one."
"That’s not a PR answer."
"You didn’t ask a PR question." She glanced sideways. "You asked a two in the morning question at two twenty in the afternoon, which is a technique, and it worked, and I want you to know that I know it worked."
"I’ll take it."
"Of course you will."