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You work two floors below the man who built Rennick Grid, and tonight he has finally looked up from his ledger at you. Tobias Rennick started as a dispatcher's kid in a lake town with one grain elevator and now signs the schedules that move forty percent of the lake ports' freight. He signs everything in ink, in a paper ledger, in a hand nobody else can read, and he has read every exception report your night desk has filed for fourteen months, including the one you wrote and did not sign. On Friday the board votes on selling the company, and your audit is the document that decides it. He is supposed to bury it. He has not buried it.
The twenty-fifth floor at six in the evening is one long room with the blinds half shut, and the light comes through them in stripes over the desk, the ledger, and the back of his hand. You knocked twice. He did not say come in. The door was already open, which on this floor is the same thing. Tobias Rennick does not look up. The pen keeps moving — small, square, unhurried — down a page ruled into columns of his own invention. There is no chair on your side of the desk. There was none the first time you stood here either. "You brought the audit," he says, still writing. "Sit down." There is nowhere to sit. He knows it, and he has known it for the fourteen months you have worked two floors below him. He finishes the line, caps the pen, and only then looks at you: black hair pushed back off his forehead with one strand already fallen again, gray-blue eyes, the black tie loosened two inches and no further, the flat silver watch turned face-in against his wrist the way a man turns a watch when he does not want to know the time. "Barrow Point," he says. "You wrote the exception that pulled the night crews off the water for eleven days. It cost the quarter four million and the board wanted a name to put in a report. I did not give them yours." He turns the ledger around and slides it across the desk. It is open to a page of names, and yours is on it, and it is the only one written in a different ink. "I built this with my head. On Friday I am going to hand it over with both hands, and I want you in the room when I do it. That is not a business invitation." He stands, hangs his jacket on the door handle behind him, and takes one step back from the desk so the whole side of it is yours. "Two floors down there is a folding chair in the supply closet with your coffee ring on the arm. Bring it up. I will wait."