HELLBOUND WITH THE ALPHA

CHAPTER 11 After Hours

The floor emptied the way it always did on a Thursday evening, gradually at first and then all at once, the sounds of a working day dissolving into the particular quiet that belonged only to buildings after hours. The overhead lights switched to their evening setting and the corridors took on a dimmer, more concentrated quality, as though the building itself was settling in.

Ava stayed at her desk.

She had a report to finish, a summary of the third quarter logistics contracts that Gerald from operations had sent over at four in the afternoon with a note asking if it could be ready by morning. She had said yes because she meant it and because she had learned in two weeks that saying yes and meaning it was the fastest way to become indispensable in a place like this.

She worked with her headphones in one earbud only the way she always did when she needed to concentrate but also wanted to remain aware of her surroundings. The building was quiet but not empty. She knew from the strip of light under his office door that Valdris was still there. She had known it for the past two hours without looking up to check, in that peripheral way she had developed of knowing where he was in any given space.

She was not thinking about it. She was thinking about the report.

At nine-fifteen, the door opened.

She heard him before she saw him, his footsteps quiet and unhurried on the floor behind her. She pulled out her earbud and kept her eyes on her screen and waited.

He crossed to the small kitchen at the end of the corridor. She heard the sound of water running, a glass being filled. A pause. Then footsteps returned.

He stopped at the corner of her desk.

She looked up.

He was looking at the report on her screen with the focused attention he gave to everything, his glass of water held loosely in one hand. He had taken off his jacket at some point in the evening and rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and it was the most undone she had seen him in two weeks, and she was aware of that in a way that she found mildly irritating.

"The Harken contract is missing the penalty clauses," he said.

"I have them in a separate tab," Ava said. "I was going to merge them into the main document once the summary section was complete. It is faster to cross-reference that way while the summary is still being written."

He looked at her. It was the particular kind of look he made when he was evaluating something, steady and without obvious expression. "All right," he said.

He went back to his office.

Ava looked at the door for a moment and then looked back at her screen and went back to work. She finished the report at ten forty and sent it to Gerald with a copy filed in the system and a brief note on her desk for Valdris in case he needed it in the morning brief.

She collected her things and called the elevator and stood in the lobby of the building waiting for her cab, and she thought about all right and the way he had said it, not like a dismissal and not like approval but something in between that she could not quite name, and she decided she was reading too much into two words from a man who probably said exactly as much as he meant and no more.

The cab came. She went home. She told herself she was not thinking about him and was approximately sixty percent successful.