Someone had given her a pair of oversized rubber boots from the hangar, and she wore them with her suit without a trace of embarrassment.
"Well," Caleb said, "I think my work here is finished."
Vivien smiled for the first time all day.
"Not yet."
"What's left?"
She held out a folder.
He opened it. The first page was an offer letter on company letterhead. He read the title at the top twice before it registered.
Director of Systems Engineering.
"The system you built at Corrigon is the foundation of every aircraft we make," Vivien said. "And somebody took it apart in the dark. This time, I want you to rebuild the whole thing properly. With nobody hiding anything. From the ground up."
Caleb looked at the page for a long time.
Then he closed the folder and looked out at the runway, where the first stars were coming out above the prairie.
* * *
Spring came late to Kansas that year. But it came.
The Meridian program had been rebuilt from its foundations, with a new safety architecture that Caleb's team designed over five brutal months. One in which no single person could silence a warning.
In late March, federal regulators signed off. Transcontinental reinstated its order.
A week later, Caleb ran the engineering division.
Now, nobody at Harland Field called him the maintenance man anymore.
Some of the younger engineers still called him the librarian. But they said it the way you say the name of someone you trust.
He hadn't changed much. He still clocked in 15 minutes early. He still carried a spiral notebook and wrote everything down. He still hated long meetings, and changed the subject whenever anyone praised him.
Mara Ellison had rewritten the company's reporting policy that winter, so that no employee who raised a safety concern could ever be disciplined for it.
One bright morning in May, Vivien came down to the test bay unannounced.
She found Caleb on his back beneath the instrument panel of a new Meridian, a flashlight in his teeth, checking a connector he had personally approved three times already.
She stood there watching him for a while before he noticed her.
"You know you have an entire team to do that," she said.
He slid out and sat up, wiping his hands on a rag.
"I know."
"So why are you under there?"
He shrugged and glanced up at the panel.
"I like seeing it work with my own eyes."
Vivien laughed softly and sat down on an equipment crate beside him.
For a while, neither of them said anything. Outside, a jet was taking off, and the whole hangar hummed faintly with the sound.
Then she asked the question she had been carrying around for months.