It was not her job to judge Bradley Kincaid. It was not her job to protect him either. If she shaded the number, if she said it with the confidence he wanted, the extra weight, the certainty, then she was no longer interpreting. She was helping him lie, and the lie would be partly hers. And if she refused, if she corrected him, if she turned to Fang and said He's asked me to say two, but I heard him on the phone, the real number is lower, then she would be something else. Not an interpreter. A judge. Someone who had decided, on her own authority, what the truth was and who deserved to hear it.
Neither of those was her job. Her job was much narrower and much harder. Her job was to be a clear pane of glass.
She leaned toward him in turn, and spoke very quietly, so that only he could hear.
"Mr. Kincaid," she said, "I'll render exactly what you say. Word for word. In exactly the tone you say it. I won't make it sound more solid than it is, and I won't make it sound less." She paused. "If you want them to hear something different, you'll have to say something different."
She sat back.
The silence that followed was long. Fang waited, hands folded. Lin held his teacup. Marcus Bell, beside Amara, had gone the color of the white porcelain plates. He was looking at his boss with an expression of naked fear, the fear of a man who had been told an hour earlier to repeat a number he knew was false, and who had said, into his phone, Two gigawatt-hours, and had felt sick ever since.
Bradley's hand stayed on his chest, over the brick.
Then, slowly, he took it away.
He laid both hands flat on the dark basalt in front of him, palms down, fingers spread, the way you might steady yourself on the deck of a boat. He looked down the table, past Lin, at Dr. Fang Lihua. He looked her in the eye.
"Four hundred megawatt-hours," he said.
Marcus Bell let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since noon.
Amara rendered it into Mandarin. Fang Lihua did not move.
Bradley went on. He did not stop to be asked. His voice was steady and unadorned, and Amara carried it across sentence by sentence, half a beat behind him.
"The plant is rated for one point two gigawatt-hours on paper," he said. "That's the nameplate. We have never run above a third of it. Not once in three years. The defect rate on the electrode coating line is about eleven percent. That's roughly four times what's acceptable. It's been there for two years. It hasn't moved." He took a breath. "And an hour ago I told my chief financial officer, on the phone, that if you asked, he should tell you two gigawatt-hours by the end of next year. I was going to tell you that myself, just now. It isn't true. If nothing changes, the realistic projection for the end of next year is maybe five hundred megawatt-hours. Maybe."
As Amara carried the last of it across, Huang Bo, who had been about to pick up a piece of black cod, slowly set his chopsticks down on their porcelain fish and left them there. Deng Kai stopped writing in the middle of a character.
Nobody on the Huaxin side said anything. The light lay gold across the stone. The fountain murmured. The sales pitch Bradley Kincaid had spent eight months preparing was gone, and in its place, on the dark table between the white flowers, sat something none of them had expected to find there.
The truth. All of it. Badly dressed, and late, and too small.
Fang Lihua was the first to speak.
She asked only one word, in Mandarin. Amara carried it across.
"Why?"
Bradley did not pretend to misunderstand her. "Why is the defect rate so high," he said. "You want to know why."
Fang nodded.
Bradley looked down at his hands on the stone. For a moment Amara thought he was going to give the investor answer, the one she had heard a hundred versions of from men in good suits on cable news: supply chain challenges, learning curve, scaling pains, industry-wide headwinds. She could see it in his face, the old reflex, the deck of slides in his head flipping to the right page.
Then she watched him put it down.
"Because I didn't listen," he said.
He told them about Tomás Herrera.
Tomás ran the electrode coating line at Fremont. He was, Bradley said, the best engineer in the building, and probably the best coating engineer Bradley had ever met. Two years ago, in the fall, Tomás had come up to Bradley's office on the second floor with a binder of data and a graph he had drawn by hand on a sheet of engineering paper, and had stood in front of Bradley's desk and explained, very patiently, that the slurry formula they had licensed from a supplier in Korea was wrong for the humidity in Fremont, which was much higher than in the dry inland city where the formula had been developed. And that the drying ovens at the end of the coating line were too short, by about thirty percent, for the speed the line was being run at. And that because of both these things, the coating on the top of the foil was drying at a different rate from the coating on the bottom, and that was what was causing the cracking at the edges, and the cracking was what was causing most of the defects.
The fix would cost about four million dollars and six weeks of downtime on the line.
"I said no," said Bradley. "I told him we didn't have four million dollars or six weeks. I told him to make it work." He looked up, down the table at Fang. "He's been trying to make it work for two years. I've never once taken his advice. On anything. I've never really listened to him at all."
Amara rendered every word. She did not soften never. She did not soften at all.
Fang looked at Lin. Lin set down, at last, the teacup he had been holding for nearly five minutes without drinking.