The city below was doing its early-morning thing as if the storm last night had never happened—towers lit once more against a gray sky, traffic threading in slow parallel lines forty floors down. Sawyer stood at the window with a coffee she didn’t remember making and watched it. She’d stood here after every major crisis the company had weathered over the past three years: the Class C lawsuit in 2024, the data breach the following winter, the fourteen months when the board had been one bad quarter away from a no-confidence vote. She’d stood here and calculated. Made lists. Mapped all the angles until the path forward showed itself with unmistakable clarity.
She thought about Nellie Fuller’s face in the firelight. About the specific sound she’d made when?—
Right. Calculating.
She had a company with more than three thousand employees who relied on her for a stable paycheck. A company she had spent half her life building using the same instincts her father had told her would amount to nothing, in a field that had told her she wouldn’t last a year. She had a development plan that would span the next twenty years of her life, if it played out the way she intended. And she had absolute authority to dictate when, how, and why Alburn Systems did anything.
None of that, she now understood, needed to include cutting down a forest that didn’t need to be cut down.
She’d known it for longer than she cared to admit. She’d felt the realization creep up on her with every step she’d watched Nellie take through that forest with pure excitement and wonderment plastered across her face, and Sawyer had felt the irksome discomfort of recognizing she was the problem.
She’d felt it last night, lying there on that terrible, wonderful couch with Nellie’s warmth at her shoulder, and had gotten up and put her damp jacket on as a result.
The coffee was going cold. The city went about its business below. Sawyer made a decision.
She was going to let Nellie win.
Not in a press release, not in a legal concession she’d have to spin for the board, not in any way that required her to perform some public conversion of character. She was simply going to stop the Phoenix Ridge development and find somewhere else to build. The world had no shortage of flat, treeless parcels she could build her data center on. Gina could locate one within a month if Sawyer put the right kind of pressure on her, which she was very good at. The board would object. Gina would object. Sawyer could handle both.
What she couldn’t handle was Nellie Fuller standing between her and her own construction equipment anymore, looking at her with those patient, infuriatingly gorgeous eyes and explaining something about rare salamanders as if Sawyer were someone worth educating.
All of the knots needed untangling, then she’d finally be able to breathe again.
Gina was in her office by nine-fifteen, which was less a testament to her punctuality than to the fact that Martha had apparently delivered the summons in a tone that didn’t invite discussion.
Gina came in carrying a leather portfolio and wearing the look she always wore when Martha’s summons had given nothing away—jaw set, eyebrows raised a little too high to really portray innocence, the slight forward lean that said her defense was assembled and ready. Sawyer knew the expression well. Sawyer had put it on her face before.
“You wanted to see me.” Gina sat down across from her without being asked. Points for confidence, she supposed.
“I did.” Sawyer leaned back in her chair. “I want you to start looking for alternative sites for the Phoenix Ridge datacenter. Flat land, existing infrastructure access, no deforestation required.”
Gina’s mock-innocent eyebrows descended slowly before gathering in the middle in a deep frown. She stared at the pen in her hand and spun it a few times between her fingers. This was a tell of hers Sawyer had learned years ago: it meant she was buying exactly one second in which to decide whether to argue.
“That’s an eighty-four million dollar project you’re packing up and moving out,” she said.
“I’m aware of that.”
“The permits took fourteen months.”
“I know how long they took, Gina. I was here.”
Gina sat back, folded her hands across her stomach, and nodded slowly. This was yet another tell, one that she deployed when she thought Sawyer was wrong but knew better than to say so immediately. Usually, Sawyer appreciated her holding her tongue. This morning it made Sawyer want to shake her and skip to the part where Gina said what she actually meant.
“This is quite the diversion,” Gina finally said. “The board is going to ask me where it came from.”
“I will deal with the board.”
“Sawyer—”
“Gina.” She spoke with just enough venom to warn her off. “I’m not asking you to explain my reasoning to the board. I’m asking you to find me a site. Those are two different jobs, and only one of them is yours.”
“Where is this coming from?”
She blinked once. “My decision-making authority.”
Gina pressed her together. Then she shifted forward in the chair, placed her hands on the edge of Sawyer’s desk, and tried a different tactic. Gina had always been better at pivoting than persisting, which was one of the reasons Sawyer had hired her and also, currently, one of the reasons she was mildly annoying.“I hear you. But you’ve got three years sunk into this site. The grid connection’s already been scoped. Macmillan’s team did the civil survey last spring. If we pull out now, we’re looking at eight million in stranded costs before we even start the conversation about the replacement timeline.”
“I know what we’re looking at.”
