Tomás had already taken a box of blue nitrile gloves from a shelf. He held out a pair to her without being asked. She took them without comment and pulled them on, and he pulled on a pair himself, and that was the last moment for three hours that either of them seemed to remember that anyone else was there.
What is the viscosity of the slurry at mixing? At coating? How do you measure it, how often? What is the solids content? What is the particle size distribution of the cathode powder, the D50, the D90? Which binder, which molecular weight? Which solvent? What order do you add the components in, and at what shear rate, and for how long? What is the temperature in the mixing room in July? In January? What is the relative humidity?
Amara carried it all. Mandarin into English for Tomás, English into Mandarin for Fang, back and forth, the two voices on either side of her coming faster and faster.
The first twenty minutes were the hardest of her life. Twice she had to stop and ask Fang to repeat a term. Once she had to stop Tomás and ask him to draw what he meant on the whiteboard mounted on the wall by the tanks, and he drew it, impatiently, a cross-section of coated foil with arrows, and she looked at it and found the word. And once Fang used a term for a particular coating defect that Amara had never heard in her life, in any language. She stopped.
"I don't know that word," she said to both of them, in both languages. "I'm sorry. Can you describe it?"
Fang looked at her for a second. Then she described it with her hands: a ridge, a thickening of the coating along the edge of the foil, where the paste piled up and refused to lie flat. She drew it in the air with one gloved finger.
"Edge bead," said Tomás instantly. "That's edge bead."
Amara gave Fang the English. Fang repeated it, edge bead, in English, carefully, testing it. Tomás nodded. And then the two of them looked at each other, the tall gray-haired Chinese chemist and the short mustached Mexican engineer, and they both started to laugh, at nothing, at the absurdity of having needed three languages to agree on the name of a lump.
After that it went faster.
After that, somewhere in the second hour, Amara stopped noticing that she was doing it. It was the thing her professors talked about and that she had only felt a few times before, in the booth, in the very best sessions. The moment when interpreting stopped being something you did and became something that happened through you. The words came in one ear in one language and went out of her mouth in the other, and she was not translating them, not choosing them, not thinking about them at all. She was simply the place where the two languages met.
Fang and Tomás moved from the mixing tanks down the line to the coating head, and then on to the ovens. They stood side by side in front of a laptop that Tomás had set up on a steel cart, looking at temperature curves, the heat profile along the length of the drying tunnel, the readings from sensors on the top and the bottom of the foil. They interrupted each other. They finished each other's sentences, through Amara, across two languages, which she had not known was possible until she heard it happen.
Fang took a marker from the whiteboard and drew a graph. Two curves. The drying rate on the top of the coating and the drying rate on the bottom, along the length of the ovens. She drew them diverging toward the end of the tunnel. Tomás looked at it, frowning, and took the marker out of her hand and corrected one of the curves, pulling it lower, steeper, near the exit. Then he handed the marker back.
Fang looked at his correction for a long moment. Then she said, in Mandarin, quietly, a single phrase.
"Exactly right."
Amara gave it to Tomás.
Tomás Herrera threw both arms in the air and shouted something in Spanish so loud that a technician fifty feet down the line turned around with a wrench in his hand to see what had happened.
"What did he say?" Fang asked Amara.
"He said," said Amara, "Finally. Finally somebody understands me."
* * *
Tomás did not turn to Fang, then. He turned around, still with his arms half raised, and looked at Bradley.
Bradley had been silent for three hours. He had followed the group along the line, a few steps behind, his hard hat on, his safety glasses on. He had taken notes twice, on a small pad from his back pocket. For a long stretch while Tomás was explaining the ovens he had stood a little apart, by himself, watching the coated foil run out of the end of the tunnel and onto its roll, black and shining, yard after yard, with an expression Amara could not read.
Now Tomás looked at him and lowered his arms.
"Two years," Tomás said. His voice was not loud anymore. "Two years I've been telling you this. The slurry is wrong for the humidity. The ovens are too short. The top dries faster than the bottom, so the coating pulls, so the edges crack, so you get the bead, so you get the scrap. Two years." He pointed at the whiteboard. "I drew you that. That exact graph. On paper. I put it on your desk. I wrote three reports. I sent you emails. I came up to your office. And every time you told me, Make it work, Tomás. Just make it work." He shook his head slowly. "And she walks in here, through an interpreter, and in one hour she sees it. One hour."
He did not say anything for a moment.
"Do you know how much this has cost?" he said. "Not to me. To the company. The scrap, the downtime, the rework, the contracts we lost because we couldn't deliver. I worked it out once. About a hundred million dollars." He laughed, without any humor. "For a four-million-dollar fix."
Bradley said nothing. He did not argue. Amara had half expected him to. He stood with his notebook in his hand and took it.