Kiran Sethi had been her deputy for six years. He was thirty-four and had a habit, when he was thinking, of tapping two fingers against his sternum as if checking that his heart was still there. She had hired him out of a community college program in Manchester and taught him everything Anselm had taught her, and when she went on leave in May she had told him the place was his until she got back. She saw now, from the way the color climbed his neck, that he had taken her more literally than she had meant.
"They offered it to me in August," he said. "Ardent did. Site lead. It's—they took on most of the team. I didn't know how to tell you. You were in the middle of—I didn't want to call you in the middle of chemo and say, hey, I took your job. I didn't think it was my news to tell. Gwendolyn said HR would handle it."
"HR handled it," Agata said. "It's all right, Kiran."
"It's not all right."
"No," she agreed. "But it's not your fault. You'd have been stupid to say no."
He set the coffee down on the desk and looked at Alvin by the door, and then back at her, and lowered his voice in the way people do when they forget that glass walls carry sound. "Did they say anything to you about 4471?"
The room got very quiet.
"I asked Gwendolyn," Agata said. "She didn't know what it was. What happened to it?"
Kiran tapped his sternum twice. "Ardent closed it. The week after you went out. Resolution code 'working as designed.' I reopened it. They closed it again. I got on a call with their engineering guy in Dallas and he said the firmware update changed the way the controllers handle the input from the panel, and that the old relay logic was a legacy configuration that wasn't compatible, and they'd recommend a hardware retrofit in the next capital cycle. Which is next year. I said, so right now, if the alarm goes off, the stair doors don't release. He said in a real alarm event the panel would also send a signal through the secondary path and that should handle it. I said should. He said they don't test with the alarm live because it calls the fire department. I asked for the secondary path test documentation. They sent me a PDF that's for a different building."
"Did you take it to Anselm?"