“She’s working within the terms of the agreement.” Sawyer said it before she’d decided to. Then, evenly: “Which I reviewed. Including clause seven, which your revision didn’t account for.”
Gina’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “I’ll have legal look at it.”
“I can’t see why you’re insisting on more red tape, Gina. The survey runs its sixty days. That’s what we agreed to. I won’t have Alburn Systems made to look like we’re trying to weasel out of the terms.”
“Of course,” she said.
She watched her leave, that deliberate unhurried stride working hard to communicate she’d already decided not to worry, and Sawyer stood in the corridor after Gina had rounded the corner, hands in her coat pockets, making no expression at all.
There’s something she’s not saying.
The thought scratched at the inside of her skull for the entire drive home.
The penthouse was quiet the way it was always quiet—efficiently, the silence of a space designed to optimize and not to accumulate. Sawyer stood at the window with a glass of water she didn’t drink and the city lit up below her in the early dark. Instead she chewed over her day, trying and failing not to simultaneously chew on the inside of her own cheeks.
The problem was not the board. The board could be managed. The problem was not Gina, though Gina had become a footnote she was increasingly reluctant to ignore. The problem was not even the eighty-million-dollar development project, which was a real number with real implications and which she had spent her career learning to treat as the governing variable in every decision she made.
The problem was that she was standing at a window she’d stood at a thousand times, in a city she’d built her life in, in a life that had been making perfectly satisfactory sense for a very long time?—
And she was wondering what Nellie Fuller had found today.
Not what it meant for the survey. Not what it meant for the agreement or the project or the days remaining. No. Sawyer was wondering whether Nellie had crouched in the dirt and saidoh, helloin that voice with no audience in mind, and whether whatever she’d spotted had made her face do what it did when the science confirmed something she’d already known—that stunning brightness, open and unguarded, like something turning toward the light.
Sawyer leaned her forehead against the cool glass of her floor-to-ceiling windows.
She could not, for the life of her, find a satisfactory framework for what to do with that image.
She suspected, staring at the city below, that she was not going to find one tonight.
9
CHAPTER 9 – NELLIE
The coordinates didn’t match, and it was driving Nellie absolutely crazy. She pressed her finger to the county map, then to her field notebook, then back to the map, and huffed “no!” in the quiet of the cottage kitchen like it would change anything.
It didn’t. The county’s 2004 hydrological survey placed the primary watercourse sixty meters west of where she’d stood yesterday afternoon—which meant either the county had been wrong in 2004, the stream had moved, or there were two different watercourses entirely and the county had only ever found one. Her gut kept returning to the third option like a nagging, highly inconvenient hypotheses, which was annoying, because inconvenient hypotheses were almost always right.
She’d been sitting with this dilemma since four-thirty, ankle propped on the second chair, three pages of the county survey pinned flat under her coffee mug and a rock from the porch. The coffee was exceptional. A fact which likely had something to do with the very fancy and very expensive beans she’d bought, justin case she ever felt like offering a certain haughty CEO a hot drink.
The last fifteen minutes of yesterday’s hike were not, for the record, being thought about. The fact that Nellie had woken at four a.m. with a very accurate memory of Sawyer Alburn’s hand against her back was fully attributable to the kind of random neural noise that produced vivid recall of minor events and had nothing whatsoever to do with the cedar-and-something-clean smell of that impractical quarter-zip. Nothing at all.
Maps had her full attention right now. Maps and nothing but maps.
She returned to the coordinate discrepancy and held the focus for approximately forty seconds before her brain, unbidden and apparently uninterested in cooperating, supplied the specific angle at which Sawyer had tipped her head to check Nellie’s footing on the last switchback. Nellie wrote “second drainage bearing: 047° NE”in her notebook in letters slightly larger than necessary and underlined it twice, which helped a little to convince herself that she was actually being productive.
The coordinates she’d recorded at the second drainage point on Wednesday put water running northeast from Eleanor’s root system in a direction the county had never documented. Not the main stream—she had that, it was logged and arguing with Gina’s access restrictions quite productively—but a second channel. Secondary drainage, upslope origin, running into territory she hadn’t fully surveyed yet.
Territory that was, by an uncomfortable margin, inside the northern sector.
She charted the bearing in her notebook until the light through the window went from gray to gold, filled two more pages of annotations, then stood—carefully, testing her ankle—and made toast and an egg. All the while, she was haunted by the distinct sense that she was circling something important.
A knock came at ten past seven.
Not Sawyer Alburn, much to Nellie Fuller’s dismay, B ut at least it wasn’t Gina either.
This was a delivery driver in a branded uniform, holding a parcel roughly the size of a shoebox, scanner extended for her signature.
“Courtesy of Alburn Systems,” she said.
