“Um,” Amy said. “My throat’s dry. Do you mind? I’ll be right back.”

“Not at all. Do you need change?”

Amy shook her head.

Vending machine.

She took the time of feeding in the change from her jacket’s inner pocket and collecting her iced tea to sort out her head. Not her thoughts, but to get to where she could have coherent thoughts in the first place.

She approached the railing, stopping short of leaning up against it. A noise below gave her an excuse to move closer to the railing and look down. The same women from earlier. One of them had thrown something into one of the big stylized trash cans in the lobby.

“Colleagues,” Amy reminded herself by saying it out loud.

“If that’s alright?”

She had no idea if she was being manipulated. She didn’t have the skillset to even begin figuring it out, or to know what to do if she’d been able to put her finger on it.

If she could re-listen to this conversation with her father, with Marquis, then he could no doubt tell her if the ‘colleague’ thing was a trap, something to get her to let her guard down, or to feign equality when they weren’t equal, when she was being tracked and closely watched by the same people who no doubt paid Jessica.

“It’s alright,” Amy said. “How are you? It’s late. Was it a long day, or—?”

“It was a very long day. Always is,” Jessica said. “But I enjoy the work I do.”

“I was wondering if you’d stayed late just to talk to me. I’m glad if you didn’t.”

“You work long hours too?”

“For a certain meaning of work. Babysitting, checking work. Some hospital work. Some research stuff. A few initiatives, like seeing if my power can engineer something to their specifications, that will curb the Machine Army’s approach.”

“How did that go?”

“I could. But they didn’t trust it. The thinkers reviewed the plan and thought it was a bad idea. It’s possible the Machine Army incorporates it or adapts to it. Or there’s something out there that would mutate or twist the pathogen.”

“That’s too bad,” Jessica said, sounding very casual about it.

“I never know what I’m going to do on one day or another. I wake up, check my emails, figure out if I can sleep in. Usually I can’t because Riley is a morning person and she wants to start the day. I’ll have ten emails and five or six will be things people want to talk to me about, and I block out the day. I get more by lunchtime and more by four. By the time I’m done, it’s eight o’clock at night.”

“You could say no, if it’s too much.”