“If you find out something more, bring it to me,” she said.

“I will,” he said, rising from his seat. She let him get almost to the doorway before she spoke again.

“Jules?”

Turning to glance over his shoulder, he looked like a still frame from a film.

“If I find out that you knew something and you didn’t tell me, I won’t take it well,” she said. “I’m not someone you want to fuck with.”

“If I didn’t know that when I came in, I do now,” Mao said. It was as good a parting line as any. The door closed behind him. Avasarala sighed, leaning back in her chair. She shifted to look at the Buddha.

“Fat lot of help you were, you smug bastard,” she said. The statue, being only a statue, didn’t reply. She thumbed down the lights and let the gray of the storm fill the room. Something about Mao didn’t sit well with her.

It might only have been the practiced control of a high-level corporate negotiator, but she had the sense of being cut out of the loop. Excluded. That was interesting too. She wondered if he would try to counter her, maybe go over her head. It would be worth telling Errinwright to expect an angry call.

She wondered. It was a stretch to believe there was anything human down on Venus. The protomolecule, as well as anyone understood it, had been designed to hijack primitive life and remake it into something else. But if… If the complexity of a human mind had been too much for it to totally control, and the girl had in some sense survived the descent, if she’d reached out to her daddy…

Avasarala reached for her hand terminal and opened a connection to Soren.

“Ma’am?”

“When I said don’t hurry, I didn’t mean you should take the whole fucking day off. My tea?”

“Coming, ma’am. I got sidetracked. I have a report for you that might be interesting.”

“Less interesting if the tea’s cold,” she said, and dropped the channel.