And stealing them.
“—but not quite. Not now. So don’t expect credit for our quantum gravity findings in SVLAC’s report to the Office of Science. Instead, why don’t you just enjoy the Swiss golf courses?”
Then she turned for the door. She took Ethan’s arm and led him out of his supervisor’s office before either man could respond.
“We’re done here.”
18
His mind was noisy, buzzing, neurons firing frenetic bits of static but generating no response to Dr. Kramer’s inquiry about his relevance to the federal physics project.
What contributions can you offer?
I expect you to provide value.
And Erin, her fingers wrapped around his arm, exerting a pull of gravity to tow him from the office—
What contributions areyouoffering to our quantum gravity research, Dr. Kramer?
His pulse was frenetic, too. Too fast, irregular, a flicker pulsing in his skull and echoing her words:We’re done here.
Insubordination.
His supervisor would retaliate. Dr. Kramer would retaliate against Erin Monaghan for her disrespect. That wasn’t a hypothesis. It was a certainty.
He will retaliate.
But he couldn’t warn her, his breath accelerating into pain now, his ears ringing, the throb behind his eyes overtaking his vision with a dark, threatening blur—andfuck, not here, because his own office was across the whole width of the watchful bullpen—
Erin hauled him to a recessed door at the end of the hall marked “Fire Exit.”
No alarms wailed when she depressed the metal crash bar to access a flight of exterior stairs leading down to SVLAC’s quadrangle. Summer air splashed his face, cooler than his skin.
“Ah—”
“Come on.” She let the hinges slam behind them, careless of the noise, while she steered him beneath the redwoods, toward a set of shadowed benches in the fragrant conifer litter. Popular with the lab’s more reclusive scientists at lunchtime, they were deserted now. She shooed a squirrel off the closest seat. “Sit.”
He collapsed.
Breathe. In. Out. I-in—
He dug his fingers into the wooden slats to keep himself upright as he tried to count, dizzy, hyperventilating. Splinters wedged under his nails.
—o-o-out—
“How can I help?”
He couldn’t answer her.
But maybe she understood that, because she perched beside him to narrow their distance. “How would Bunsen help you?”
She knew.
Shame careened through him in a hot, awful tide of self-loathing and humiliation, andno—fuck—don’t see me like this—please leave, please—
“…s-stay,” he said.
She nodded. Erin uncurled his left hand and slid their palms together, intertwining their fingers. The fierceness of the hold could’ve been her grip, or his. It didn’t matter. He clung to it and to her as she extracted the crumpled hutch blueprints from under his arm, their edges limp with his sweat while she spread them over his knees, while she took the pen from behind his ear and uncapped it. She offered the nib to him.
