Oh, God.
Maybe she took pity on him, because she left it at that. She wrapped the napkin around her damp cone and said, “Let’s start at the beginning. I had a fairly major issue with the onboarding documents on my first day. After you shoulder-checked me by the bullpen.”
“You sent myNature Physicsrevise-and-resubmit form to the reviewers when I hadn’t finished the edits to Dr. Kramer’s paper,” he collected himself to retort. “Tomypaper. You used my initials.”
“They’re also my initials,” she replied reasonably, then licked her ice cream. Unreasonably. “Human Resources rushed me through the paperwork. I signed what they told me to sign. YourNature Physicsform got in the line-up somehow, so I submitted it, too. And since they took months to return my finalized documents, I only learned about the error after you’d already… But it was an accident.”
He pressed the chilly sherbet cup into his lap. “Which I didn’t know. Not until I’d switched the time zones on your calendar. When I read your introductory email after I got back from CERN, I thought you’d done reconnaissance on me. You’d submitted my paper to the journal with incomplete edits. That made me look like an idiot, and made Dr. Kramer—”
“Why would I have tried to sabotage you at that point? I didn’t know you, and your shoulder-check wasn’tthatbad.”
“Um.” He began to fiddle with his spoon, bending the plastic, testing its tensile strength. “You… you have competitive brothers, right?”
“Why does that matter?” She shook her head at his nonsequitur, then shrugged again and bit into her ice cream before it seeped through her napkin. “But I do. I didn’t tell them anything about…this, though, because theydefinitelywould’ve tried to sabotage you. I love them, but they can be insane about some things. Not about protecting me from losing at Monopoly or baseball, but everything else? When I mentioned that my doctoral advisor and research cohort—all men, by the way—had tried to scrub my name from a joint research paper before publication, they threatened to break skulls.”
“You didn’t tell your brothers about our rivalry, because they would’ve tried to help you.”
“They would’ve made things worse. I can handle myself.”
“I know you can.” He dug his spoon deeper into the sherbet. “Uh, I… I also have a brother. But our rivalry isn’t over Monopoly or fast pitches. It’s not… fun. It’s not… nice.”
“Oh.” She was quiet for a moment, eyebrows pinched over her nose, thinking. Then, with a slow nod, “Right. I guess it makes sense that with the data you had on hand and with physics being such a cutthroat field, it seemed plausible that I’d try something unethical. And, of course, I retaliated to your time zone switch by running a binary program on your data export, whichwasexplicit sabotage—because it seemed like you’d come back from Switzerland and vandalized my calendar unprovoked, since Human Resources still hadn’t told me about theNature Physicssigning error yet. Then you responded by… I don’t even remember. But it was too late by then, anyhow. Neither of us was going to back down at that point, even once we knew… Though whatdidyou do? Let the air out of my tires?”
“Yes. I thought about switching your brake configurations, too. I just never remembered to bring the tools. But that would’ve been actively dangerous—”
Her elbow tapped his arm. “You kept my practical mechanics skills fresh. Not just my relativistic ones. Should I be thanking you for that? Next time my oldest brother’s in town and his rust bucket of a Jeep blows a head gasket, I’ll be primed to fix it.”
He couldn’t laugh with her, though. He could’ve hurt her.Reallyhurt her. He thrust away his cup, abruptly queasy. “I escalated things. With your bicycle. With everything I said about your research methods and data in that all-hands. I… I’m sorry.”
“We both escalated.”
“Still—”
“No.” She knocked her boot into his. “Don’t toss that sherbet. You promised that I could have the spoon, remember? Don’t take my narrative from me, either. We each thought that the other person’s actions were tantamount to declaring war, and I can see why we would.”
“That’s not an excuse for what I—”
“—whatwedid. I know. But based on the data and backgrounds we both brought to the situation, now we understand thewhy. Ethan…” She tugged at his sherbet and passed over her ice cream; his fingers automatically curled around the waffle cone, and when he raised his eyes in question, he found the berry-stained curve of her lips parted on an exhale, on his name, her gaze suddenly serious. “Ethan, I’m sorry, too. For my questions during the Department of Energy’s visit, and for afterward. I was trying to even our score. But it wasn’t right. And I… I didn’t know. I only looked at the information I had on you. I didn’t think about what I wasn’t seeing.Bannister. I committed—”
“—the scientific cardinal sin?”
Her teeth clicked together, softness vanishing. But the dimple trembling in her cheek was evidence of a nascent, reluctant smile. “I wouldn’t go that far!”
“Dr. Fong isn’t here. Your secret’s safe.” He leaned back against their bench, breathing again.
“Maybe. But Forster’s isn’t. There’s no putting Schrödinger’s cat back in that box.”
“Your odds are fifty-fifty.”
“Generous, but no. Because now I’m in a situation where I know thatyouknow. And since we both know, the cat’s loose.” She poked his spoon into the sherbet, shaking her head again. “Forster and Bannister—God.Tell methoseodds, that we would’ve met this way.”
“Very small. I might not even include their probability in a quantum analysis.”
“Now, that’s just insulting.”
“I’m not wrong. It was unlikely that we would’ve met throughGalactica Magazine. Even more unlikely that the editors would’ve paired our submissions together—”
“—and that our work would be complementary: black holes that—no.Wait.” Gasping, Erin snatched back her cone. “You copied my research for your drawing. The movement of black holes and stars ismyspecialty!”
