It looked like Jacob wasn’t the only one who knew how to manipulate people. The only difference was that Jacob had natural talent, and Simon had studied interrogation techniques. He wasn’t sure who came out ahead there, morally speaking.
“I think he… I can’t shake the idea he died because I called him,” Lau said. He added a scoffing little laugh at the end, a nervous cue for Simon to disagree with him. “Like, stupid, right?”
He looked hopefully at Simon, eyes in search of some reassurance that he hadn’t fucked up. All he got was a noncommittal grunt, while Simon scrambled at the pieces of information behind his carefully expressionless face.
“When?” he asked. “When did you first make contact?”
Doubt flickered over Lau’s face—surely Simon should have known that—but guilt and fear battered it back. “Eight months ago, when the causal-reasoning…” He took a look at Simon’s face and tried again. “When the program kept having irretrievable crashes, I recognized Clayton’s input on the code we were using. I beta’d on the PeaPod’s location-sharing app before they sold it off. So I assumed he was in the loop on the project. I contacted him to ask for some advice.”
Dates flipped by in Simon’s head as he constructed the timeline and stacked the days, one on top of the other. Eight months put Lau in Alaska—officially put Lau in Alaska—and a couple of weeks before he “resigned” from Syntech to make his own way home. It also possibly highlighted one of Simon’s people as a turncoat, but that could be handled later.
“He didn’t believe you?”
Lau shook his head and freed a hand from his cup to shove his glasses back up on his nose.
“Didn’t have a clue,” he said. “Look, I fessed up to the mistake at the time, and I haven’t had any contact with him since.”
Simon raised his eyebrow. “Really?”
Whatever confidence Lau had pulled out of the conversation and the coffee drained out of his face. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“He thought he was meeting you for coffee on the day he died.”
Lau put his coffee down on the table with a too-hard clack. “I didn’t contact him,” he said. Simon waited, and Lau broke miserably in the silence. “Fuck. Fine. You know what? Yeah, I was supposed to meet him that day. I didn’t contact him, though. Clayton tracked me down and asked to meet.”
“And you said yes.”
“Yeah. I should have said no, but I didn’t,” Lau said it cockily, all “so what” attitude and jutting chin. But his hands shook, and he kept licking his lips. “So? I didn’t talk to him. You can’t throw me in jail for planning to have a coffee with someone. Maybe I had a thing for him?”
“You could still be fired. We don’t have to give reason—”
“Good,” Lau spat back. Then he promptly winced back from the word as though it had surprised him. He didn’t retract it, though. “Ramsey, if I wanted to work for the government, I’d have gone to Russia to dissolve clouds. I just want to go back to work in the lab, on my actual field of study. When I was recruited, Porter told me we were going to reverse climate change.”
“Dev talks a good game.”
“He talks a big game,” Lau corrected him. “That’s what I liked—the ambition to actually change the world with science.Literallychange the world. Instead I’m working on targeting algorithms to use with Icarus. I’m notstupid, you don’t need to target clouds.” He paused to rub the heel of his hand against his forehead. “I’m stuck out here in the train station of Texas with no one to talk to. Look. I appreciate that being put in charge of this project was a great opportunity for me, but I just want to get back into the labs and get back into my own field again. You’re related to Porter. You can talk to him. Get me reassigned.”
“What did he say when you asked him?”
Lau sagged back into the couch. It was new enough to creak under him, maybe only eight months or so old.
“That I’d committed to his project and had to see it through.” He spit the words out like they tasted bad. “That things would be changing soon and to have patience.”
The way he said the words sounded like a direct quote, the sort of disappointing e-mail you memorized and grumbled about to your friends. Except they didn’t sound like Dev. Not even a Dev who had forgotten how much he hated authority and was running black-site labs behind Simon’s back. Dev didn’t value patience. It wasn’t a trait he’d ever name-check to anyone. Dev would have told Lau to grit through it or complete the project if he wanted out of it that badly.
“When did you last speak to Dev, to Mr. Porter?”
“Yesterday? Yesterday morning,” Lau said. Then he shifted. Clearly the habit of precision made him uncomfortable. “I mean, not personally. I talked to the project lead, like always.”
“And they told you to be patient?”
“Yeah. But it’s been three years since they put me on this project. It was only ever meant to be a brief secondment and—”
Copper pennies on his tongue and dust in Simon’s nose—the sudden hit of adrenaline dragged down the relief he’d felt a second before. Stupid fucking brain. He clenched his jaw and tried to hold on to what he’d just learned—that Lau had never spoken to Dev directly and that the project started three years earlier—when Dev was busy not accepting that Becca was dying.
It was what he’d wanted—needed—to hear, and apparently that was enough to kick off a fight or flight reaction.
“Are you all right?” Lau looked at him with concern.
