“Yep.”
Rocío murmurs, “Wow,” and for once doesn’t even sound like a sullen Lovecraftian teenager. I’d tease her about it, but I can’t focus on anything but the helmet prototype. Guy is saying something about design and stage of development, but I tune him out and step closer. I knew that it’d be made from a combination of Kevlar and carbon fiber cloth, that the visor would carry thermal and eyetracking capabilities, that the structure would be streamlined to host new functionalities. What I did not know was how stunning it would look. A breathtaking piece of hardware, designed to house the software I’ve been hired to create.
It’s beautiful. It’s sleek. It’s . . .
Wrong.
It’s all wrong.
I frown, peering closer at the pattern of holes in the inner shell. “Are these for the neurostimulation output?”
The engineer working at the helmet station gives me a confused look.
“This is Dr. Königswasser, Lamar,” Guy
explains. “The neuroscientist from NIH.”
“The one who fainted?”
I knew this would haunt me, because it always does. My nickname in high school was Smelling Salts Bee. Damn my useless autonomic nervous system.
“The one and only.” I smile. “Is this the final placement for the output holes?”
“Should be. Why?”
I lean closer. “It won’t work.” A brief silence follows, and I study the rest of the grid.
“Why do you say that?” Guy asks.
“They’re too close—the holes, I mean. It looks like you used the International 10–20 system, which is great to record brain data, but for neurostimulation . . .” I bite into my lip. “Here, for instance. This area will stimulate the angular gyrus, right?”
“Maybe? Let me just check. . . .” Lamar scrambles to look at a chart, but I don’t need confirmation. The brain is the one place where I never get lost.
“Upper part— stimulation at the right frequency will get you increased awareness. Which is exactly what we want, right? But stimulation of the lower part can cause hallucinations. People experiencing a shadow following them, feeling as though they’re in two places at the same time, stuff like that. Think of the consequences if someone was in space while that happened.” I tap the inner shell with my fingernail. “The outputs will need to be farther apart.”
“But . . .” Lamar sounds severely distressed. “This is Dr. Ward’s design.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure Dr. Ward knows nothing about the angular gyrus,”
I murmur distractedly.
The ensuing silence should probably tip me off. At least, I should notice the sudden shift in the atmosphere of the lab. But I don’t and keep staring at the helmet, writing possible modifications and workarounds in my head, until a throat clears somewhere in the back of the room. That’s when I lift my eyes and see him.
Levi.
Standing in the entrance.
Staring at me.
Just staring at me. A tall, stern, snow-tipped mountain. With his expression—the one from years ago, silent and unsmiling. A veritable Mount Fuji of disdain.
Shit.
My cheeks burn. Of course. But of course, he just caught me trash-talking his neuroanatomy skills in front of his team like a total asshole. This is my life, after all: a flaming ball of scorching, untimely awkwardness.
“Boris and I are in the conference room. You ready to meet?” he asks, his voice a deep, severe baritone. My heart thuds. I rack my brain for something to say in response.
Then Guy speaks and I realize that Levi isn’t even addressing me. He is, in fact, completely ignoring me and what I just said. “Yep. We were just about to head there. Got sidetracked.”
Levi nods once and turns around, a silent but clear order to follow him that everyone seems eager to obey. He was like that in grad school, too.
Natural leader. Commanding presence. Someone whose bad side you wouldn’t want to be on.
Enter me. A proud resident of his bad side for several years, who just renewed her housing permit with a few simple words.
“Is that Dr. Ward?” Rocío whispers as we enter the conference room.
“Yup.”
“Welp. That was excellent timing, boss.”
I wince. “What are the chances that he didn’t hear me?”
“I don’t know. What are the chances that his personal hygiene is very poor and he has huge wax balls in his ear canal?”
The room is already crowded. I sigh and take the first empty seat I can find, only to realize that it’s across from Levi. Awkwardness level: nuclear.
I’m making better and better choices today. Cheering erupts when someone deposits two large boxes of donuts in the center of the table—NASA employees are clearly as enthused by free food as regular academics. People start calling dibs and elbowing each other, and Guy yells over the chaos,
