I opened my mouth. I had a whole line ready about Burger Guy being available for a very reasonable fee.
She turned toward Javier.
"You're Javier Mendoza," she said.
Javier's pen fell out of his hand. It rolled across his tide chart, off the table, and onto the carpet, and he did not pick it up. His face went gray, then red, and then a blotchy mix of both.
"I, um," he said. "Yes. Hi, I'm Javier. That's me, ma'am."
"I read your buoy work on the Monterey clear," Imani told him. She pulled a slim tablet out of her blazer and tapped it awake, and the screen showed one of his hand-drawn tide graphs, photographed and blown up big. "The FGRA tables had that window at ninety-two minutes, and you corrected it to eighty off four years of raw data and a moon phase adjustment. Our field analysts passed it around the office for two days. One of them cried a little, and he's a very large man."
Javier made a sound that I could not spell.
