The emergency session was already in progress when I arrived.
I could tell from the quality of the silence in the corridor outside the conference room. Not the ordinary hush of a building at work. The particular held-breath quiet of a room full of people who had just been told something they didn’t want to know and were still deciding what to do with their faces.
Daniel was waiting by the door. He looked at me the way he looked at things when he was containing himself with significant effort, which was not a good sign. Daniel’s default expression was measured. When measured required effort, it meant something had gone properly wrong.
“How bad?” I said.
“Bad enough that Adrian sent everyone except the core team to lunch twenty minutes early.”
He opened the door.
-----
The subsidiary
