“You want some tea?”

“No, thank you,” Mao said.

“Soren! Go get me some tea.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said.

“Soren.”

“Ma’am?”

“Don’t hurry.”

“Of course not, ma’am.”

The door closed behind him. Mao’s smile looked weary.

“Should I have brought my attorneys?”

“Those rat fuckers? No,” she said, “the trials are all done with. I’m not here to reopen any of the legal wrangling. I’ve got real work to do.”

“I can respect that,” Mao said.

“I have a problem,” Avasarala said. “And I don’t know what it is.”

“And you think I do?”

“It’s possible. I’ve been through a lot of hearings about one damn thing and another. Most of the time they’re exercises in ass covering. If the unvarnished truth ever came out at one, it would be because someone screwed up.”

The bright blue eyes narrowed. The smile grew less warm.

“You think my executives and I were less than forthcoming? I put powerful men in prison for you, Assistant Undersecretary. I burned bridges.”

Distant thunder mumbled and complained. The rain redoubled its angry tapping at the pane. Avasarala crossed her arms.

“You did. But that doesn’t make you an idiot. There are still things you say under oath and things you dance around. This room isn’t monitored. This is off the record. I need to know anything you can tell me about the protomolecule that didn’t come out in the hearings.”

The silence between them stretched. She watched his face, his body, looking for signs, but the man was unreadable. He’d been doing this too long, and he was too good at it. A professional.

“Things get lost,” Avasarala said. “There was one time during the finance crisis that we found a whole auditing division that no one remembered. Because that’s how you do it. You take part of a problem and you put it somewhere, get some people working on it, and then you get another part of the problem and get other people working on that. And pretty soon you have seven, eight, a hundred different little boxes with work going on, and no one talking to anyone because it would break security protocol.”