Chapter 275
“Don’t worry,” Isolde said. She checked her watch. She had one hour to get to Orbital Systems.
She stepped into the small bathroom attached to the room and looked at her reflection. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face pale. She looked like a victim.
She opened her purse and pulled out a tube of dark red lipstick. She applied it carefully. It wasn’t makeup. It was war paint.
She walked out of the bathroom and kissed her mother’s forehead.
“I have a meeting,” Isolde said. “When I come back, we are going to be rich.”
She walked out of the hospital, her heels clicking against the floor, leaving the Lancaster name behind in the lobby.
𝗥еad 𝘧r𝖾e 𝗇𝗈vе𝗅ѕ 𝘰𝗇 𝗀a𝗹n𝗼𝘷𝖾𝗅s.с𝗼𝘮
Orbital Systems Headquarters was a fortress of glass and steel located in the Navy Yard. It looked less like a corporate office and more like a spaceship that had landed in Brooklyn.
Isolde arrived at the reception desk and smoothed her skirt.
“I’m here to see Sterling Stone,” she told the receptionist, a young man with a nose ring. “Tell him Arland Roth sent me.”
The receptionist didn’t look up from his screen. “Mr. Stone doesn’t take walk-ins. Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” Isolde said. “But tell him I’m Isolde Briggs.” She used her maiden name. Lancaster would open doors, but it would close the ones she wanted to enter.
The receptionist sighed and typed something. “He’s in the lobby café. You can try to catch him, but he hates interruptions.”
Isolde turned and walked toward the café area. It was crowded with engineers and coders, a sea of hoodies and laptops.
She spotted him instantly.
Sterling Stone didn’t look like a billionaire. He looked like a college student who hadn’t slept in a week — faded grey hoodie, jeans, sneakers. He was standing at a high-top table, arguing with a man in a suit.
“The heat dissipation is wrong!” Sterling was yelling, waving a tablet. “It will melt the casing at Mach 3! Do you want to kill the pilots?”
The man in the suit — clearly a senior engineer — looked flustered. “Mr. Stone, the simulations say—”
“The simulations are garbage!” Sterling shouted, slamming the tablet down.
The engineer flinched. The stack of large blueprints he was holding slipped from under his arm and scattered across the polished concrete floor, sliding under tables and chairs.
People nearby stopped talking, but nobody moved to help. They were used to Sterling’s tantrums.
Isolde walked forward and knelt down, gathering the papers. She grabbed a large schematic for a fuel injector assembly and paused, her eyes narrowing.
Her engineer’s brain engaged automatically. She traced the lines of the intake manifold.
“The intake angle is too steep,” Isolde muttered to herself. “That’s why it overheats.”
“Excuse me?”
She looked up. Sterling Stone was standing over her, not looking at her face — looking at the blueprint in her hands.
Isolde stood up. She didn’t hand the paper back. She held it up.
.
.