Chapter 20: Lance Resigns

Lance had been in the building since four forty-seven in the morning.

He knew this because the badge reader logged every entry, and he had designed the audit layer that fed those logs into Excalibur's access monitoring system, and he had been aware for some time that someone was reading them. He had come in at four forty-seven because he could not sleep, and because the alternative to being here was being somewhere else, and he had nowhere else that was his anymore.

He had made coffee in the engineering kitchen on the third floor — not the executive suite, not the place where the espresso machine Arthur had bought for the team after the Series B close still produced a crema so precise it looked designed. The third-floor kitchen had a drip machine and paper filters and a ceramic mug with a hairline crack along the handle that someone had been meaning to throw away for two years. Lance drank from it standing at the counter in the dark, watching the parking lot through the window as the sky behind the hills shifted from black to the particular gray that preceded dawn on the peninsula.