The title was “Can we spin this?” She wished she had the attachment mentioned, Neuroplasticity in Early Adopters; the brief e-mail thread that followed repeated six variations on “bury it.” If her brother had given this to her by hand, she would have hugged him. As it was, she sent him silent thanks, took a quick shower, restocked her bag with meds, and headed back to the meeting space, too excited to wait until morning.
She’d taken the night’s last northbound bus to get home, and the last southbound would’ve passed ages ago. She usually avoided transit apps because she didn’t like being tracked, but it was the only option short of flagging a hack, which would give her moms heart palpitations and made her kind of nervous herself at this time of night. App it was.
“Are you sure that’s your destination?” the driver asked.
“I’m sure,” Sophie said firmly. “Do you ask everyone that question?”
The woman turned and drove. Sophie knew she’d been curt, but it was nobody’s business where she was headed. Just because she was small and young-looking didn’t mean she didn’t have places to go.
The meeting space was dark, but light spilled from under the office door, allowing Sophie to navigate past the sleeping bodies, stepping on only a few. She thought she recognized Dominic’s muffled “ow” just outside the office.
Gabe frowned when she pushed the door open. “I thought you went home?”
“I did. Then I came back. Check this out.” She pulled the folded paper from her backpack and passed it to him.
“Whoa.”
“Right?”
“Your brother?”
Sophie nodded.
He read it again. “Are you going to turn it in to National?”
“I didn’t like what they did with the ID—no offense!” As she said it, she remembered Gabe’s part in that. “I just thought they squandered the opportunity, and as far as we know nothing came of it. I think we should handle this ourselves.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Wasn’t there that one reporter who called after the break-in who seemed trustworthy to you? I think we should give this to a reporter. National would tell us to wait, and I don’t want to wait.”
“That makes sense. Hmm. There was that one who asked different questions than the others, like he had a different angle. Maybe him? I kept his name somewhere.”
“Cool.”
Gabe poked around the cluttered desk, and a minute later, pulled a scrap of paper from under some other scraps of paper. “Eduardo Toledo. I remembered it because he had a cool name, and when I looked him up he’d done a bunch of investigative stuff. He asked the same questions about whether we knew about the break-in, but then he also asked about the meetings themselves, and the demographics of the attendees, and if they differed from donor demographics. He wanted to know if it was only people who’d never had Pilots, so maybe he has some related angle?”
“Sounds good. Do you want to reach out, or you want me to?”
“How about I’ll message him but tell him to talk to both of us?”
That made Sophie happy. Not because it had to be only her, but because she wanted to be part of it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
DAVID
The call from Nina’s office came at nine thirty a.m. They’d had a meeting scheduled for ten a.m. to discuss his idea for a new outreach project to help people like Milo who struggled after leaving the military, and he was still gathering his thoughts, which was why he was surprised to be paged half an hour early. He entered to find her table ringed with Nina, a security officer, the head of Communications, and a fourth stranger, who introduced herself as Ms. Ritter, HR.
This office always irritated David because Nina kept music on low volume, this weird staccato electronic stuff where he couldn’t quite find the beat, and if he found the beat he could file it away, but the beat kept changing and bringing itself to the forefront of his attention. She had clacker balls on her desk, too, and a couple of other toys he never saw her touch, all of which caught the sun and tossed it around the room at odd angles. The security officer stood and resituated himself behind David, near the door, leaning against the wall like he’d meant to leave but hey, he might as well hang out, though the casual lean was betrayed by a nervous foot that he tapped in a nonrhythm entirely unlike the music’s nonrhythm. David’s head hurt.
A tissue box had been placed at the table’s center, so David knew he was being fired. He didn’t know why he knew that; he’d never been fired before. Something about the combination of these things: his supervisor’s office, HR, security. He’d gotten that feeling when he walked in, but the tissues solidified it. He debated leading with that, but decided to make them work for it.
“David,” the HR person began. “First of all, we want to thank you for all the hard work you’ve done for our company since you started here. The Pilots for Prison Guards initiative was a success because of you.”
Nina and Communications both nodded their heads in agreement. There was a pause where he thought maybe he was supposed to nod his head as well, maybe agree, or say how much fun it had been to work on the campaign. He kept his mouth shut.
“But, well, we think we’ve got a new direction
