Page 43
“Probably. Most artists produce work that’s beautiful. Yours produces work that does something. The distinction wasn’t visible to you because nothing in your training taught you to look for it.”
“That’s an insane amount of information to receive before I’ve even had real breakfast, on any given morning.”
“I’m aware. I’d apologize for the timing, except there was never going to be a convenient one, and I’d rather you have it hungry than not have it at all.”
“Does it work on all dragons, or specifically on you? Asking for purely professional reasons.”
“Unknown. The theory doesn’t extend that far yet. Victor’s working on it, alongside everything else he’s currently working on today, which is a great deal more than any one man should reasonably be asked to handle this early in a morning.”
“I want it on record that I’m handling this remarkably well, all things considered. I expect credit later. Possibly a plaque.”
“Noted. I’ll have one made.”
“Bronze. With my name spelled correctly, which is more than most people manage on the first attempt.”
“I’ll supervise the engraving personally, and check it twice.”
Her own phone buzzed in her lap, and she flipped it over on reflex, grateful for an excuse to look at literally anything else for four seconds.
JESSA: you never came back to the studio last night. am I calling the police, or ordering a cake
JESSA: I’ve narrowed it down to cake
JESSA: WHAT FLAVOR CAKE ROMILY
She typed back with her thumb, screen angled away from Norden on principle, even though he was very pointedly not looking. Alive. Fine. Long story. Tell you later.
JESSA: “long story” is doing an enormous amount of lifting in that sentence and we both know it
JESSA: does the long story involve the dragon
JESSA: I’m assuming yes. I’m framing my assumption. it’s already on the wall.
She set the phone in her lap without answering that one, which was, itself, an answer, and didn’t miss the way Norden’s mouth had gone very carefully neutral, like a man doing an excellent job of pretending he hadn’t noticed what kind of text had made her go faintly pink.
His phone buzzed in the cupholder somewhere around the fourth red light after that, and he glanced at it with the automatic efficiency of someone who treated an unread message like an open threat rather than a curiosity.
“Victor?”
“An access anomaly overnight. A credential used in the service corridors outside its normal shift window.” He set the phone back down without picking it up fully, attention barely leaving the road. “Probably nothing. A coordinator working late, a forgotten log-out. He’s chasing it down.”
“You don’t sound worried.”
“Not yet.” He said it, and then didn’t say anything else about it, the anomaly tucked somewhere behind the far larger fact of the woman sitting in his passenger seat processing the worst morning of information she’d received in years with more composure than most executives managed over a bad quarterly report.
“Should I be worried?”
“Not about this specifically. About the general situation, moderately, which is precisely why you now know the general situation,” he said. “I’d rather you worry accurately than not worry incorrectly.”
“That’s a very strange sentence.”
“It’s a real one.”
She didn’t think about it again. Neither did he, not for a while yet, both of them too occupied with the more immediate work of figuring out what came next between two people who’d started the previous evening arguing and ended it far closer than either of them had planned to get.
He pulled up outside the hotel’s staff entrance instead of the main doors, which she noted and didn’t comment on, and put the car in park without immediately releasing her.
“You could take the day off.”
