"Mine is that it doesn’t matter, and it has never mattered, and I have spent nineteen years watching provenance get used as a polite word for lineage while actual capability got filed under variance." Something moved through her voice that had not been in the conference room. "I came up in Verano with a Common-tier utility Aspect and a mother who cleaned offices in the Corridor, and I sat in a falls module at seventeen with legacy kids who had private coaches, and the only person in that building who treated me like a person with a ceiling was a mid-tier mobility Hero from nowhere with a name nobody outside her agency knew. So no. I don’t think the source is the point. I think the source is what people reach for when they want permission to stop paying attention."
"And the correct one."
"The correct one is that it stops mattering the second you’re strong enough to make it stop mattering, and until then it is the only thing anyone will ever discuss, and the gap between those two states is where careers go to die." She started through the gate. "Radiant closed that gap in four minutes with twenty-seven people. That is the only method anybody has ever found. It is not a strategy, Lukas, it is a lottery with a body count, and the reason I am attaching my agency’s name to your file two weeks before I have any evidence is that I would rather be early and wrong than watch another one of you go into that lottery alone."
The garden was empty. Somebody’s sprinkler had been running and the path was dark in patches and the jasmine along the east wall was going hard in the heat, and I walked next to her through it and did not say anything for about fifteen seconds, because what I wanted to say was that I did not deserve any of that, and that is not a sentence you hand to a woman who has already decided to spend her credibility on you.
"You’re going to be disappointed in me at some point," I said instead.
"Almost certainly."
"I mean specifically. Not generally."
"I understood you specifically." She stepped over a wet patch without breaking stride. "Here’s what I’ll say about that, and then we’re done and you can go be tired at Cole Dravid. I have read your file, I have read your mother’s file, and I have now spent one hour with you, and I have concluded four things. You are lying about something structural. You are not lying about wanting this. You are significantly more dangerous than the paperwork implies, and you are eighteen and carrying it by yourself, and that last one is the only one that actually worries me."
"Diane’s carrying some of it."
"Diane is carrying it the way a person carries something they intend to keep." She said it without heat, which made it worse. "That is not the same as help. Ask her sometime what the rest of the answer was. Nine years ago. She’ll tell you the truth if you ask her when she’s tired."
The north lot came up through the trees, sixteen cars and a shuttle bay and heat coming off the asphalt in that visible way, and hers was the black one at the end with the plates that meant a leasing company in Sacramento.
She stopped at the driver’s door and did not open it.
"Two weeks," she said.
"Two weeks."
"On the floor. Faculty side. I’ll have the sensor feeds and I will be watching the trauma numbers, not you, for the first ninety seconds, because the trauma numbers cannot perform." She looked up at me then, and she had to, because the heels only put her at about five nine and I have a Demigod trait that has been quietly rearranging my shoulders for a month like a landlord doing unrequested renovations. "Save people. That’s all. Don’t be clever, don’t be spectacular, don’t give me a moment for the deck. Get bodies out and keep them breathing and let me watch you do it, and I will handle every conversation that happens afterward."
"And if the numbers come back off by a factor of ten."
"Then I’ll have been right, and I’ll have been standing next to you, and we will have a very unpleasant Saturday." Her hand found the door handle and stayed on it. "Lukas."
"Odette."
"Your mother put me on my back forty times." The wind moved and a piece of her hair came out of the clip and she did not fix it. "Forty-first, she let me stay up. And I asked her why she stopped, and she said she hadn’t stopped, she just wanted me to know what it felt like before the next forty. I have thought about that sentence for twenty-two years."
She folded herself into the back seat of the car with the specific efficiency of someone who has done this forty times today and will do it forty more tomorrow, and the door shut with the kind of sound that costs more than the Fitzgerald house’s kitchen remodel last year.
The window came down about four inches. The engine turned over smooth and quiet, something German and overengineered. She leaned forward just enough that I could see her eyes in the gap, and they were the same color they had been across the table, the same color they probably were when she was on her back for the forty-first time, and she was already looking at the side mirror because the conversation was over and the next thing was starting.
"Twelve minutes was generous." The car started rolling. Her voice carried through the gap with perfect clarity, no strain, no adjustment, like she had calibrated for road noise before she opened her mouth. "You took nineteen."
The sedan moved past me at exactly the speed of someone who knows what the cameras track and what they don’t, and the last thing she said came out level and deliberate and aimed at the rearview like she was filing it somewhere I wouldn’t see until later.
"Tell Diane I said thank you for the coffee."
I stood in a visitor lot in the middle of the afternoon and watched a black sedan turn onto the service road, and I had six pages of federal cover, two agencies off my back, one classmate who had signed her own name into the machinery for me, and a woman with nineteen years and no reason to bother who had just told me she would rather be early and wrong.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Diane: nineteen minutes. we are going to talk about that.
Diane: I love you. don’t be late for Cole.
And when I turned around to walk back, Petra Lang was standing at the fourth floor window with her page still in both hands, watching the empty road where the car had been.