The fog was beginning to lift. It did that some days around noon, not burning off all at once but thinning, so that the light through the glass roof went from gray to silver and from silver, slowly, to a pale and uncertain gold. Under that light the Long Table looked like something from a dream she might have had as a child: dark stone, white flowers, white plates, black chopsticks, and the line of little porcelain fish swimming down both sides.
She thought of her mother.
Every Sunday, on the twenty-third floor of a tower on Hongli Road in Futian, in a flat so small that the dining table was also the desk and the ironing board and the place where Amara did her homework, her mother had set the table properly. Placemats. Folded napkins. A jar with whatever flowers were cheapest at the market. And at every place, both a pair of chopsticks and a fork.
We're a family that lives in two worlds, her mother used to say, setting them down side by side. So we eat with both.
Amara had found it embarrassing when she was eight. By the time she was twelve she had found it ordinary. Now she would have given almost anything she owned to sit at that table one more Sunday and choose between a fork and a pair of chopsticks.
She thought of Chen Popo, and the cane, and the green awning.
And then, because she could not help it, she thought of Carl. Looks the part.
She let the thought come, and she looked at it, and then she put it down. Deliberately. The way you put down a bag that is too heavy to carry and that you have decided you are not going to carry anymore today.
She checked the time. Eleven-fifty. The delegation was due at one.
At ten past twelve, a tall man in a navy suit came striding up the central gravel path from the front entrance with a phone pressed to his ear, talking fast, and behind him, half a step back, walking quickly to keep up, came a young man in glasses carrying two leather bags.
Amara, standing by the ferns at the end of the lemon trees, watched them come.
She felt it before he even looked at her. The weather changing. The look, on its way.
* * *
Bradley Kincaid had been awake since 3:15 that morning.
He had woken the way he woke most nights now, all at once, with his heart going hard and his mind already running, and he had lain in the dark for ten minutes trying to convince himself to go back to sleep. Then he had given up and gone downstairs in his boxer shorts and bare feet and stood in the kitchen of his house in Pacific Heights, with the lights off and the city glittering below him through the big windows, and opened his laptop on the marble island, and looked at the spreadsheet.
It was a simple spreadsheet. His CFO had built it in the spring, when things had begun to go seriously wrong, and it had only four lines that mattered. Cash on hand. Monthly burn. Runway in months. Runway in days.
At the bottom, in a cell that his CFO had colored red and labeled, in a moment of bleak humor that Bradley had not appreciated, DAYS UNTIL WE CALL THE LAWYERS, there was a number.
53.
He had stood there in the dark looking at it for a long time.
Five years ago, Kincaid Grid Storage had been the most talked-about energy company in the Bay Area. Possibly the country. Bradley had founded it at thirty-nine, after a decade in enterprise software that had made him comfortably rich and profoundly bored, and a divorce that had left him with half a house in Marin, a forty-foot sailboat he had never once taken out of the marina, and a burning need to build something he could touch. Something real. Something that mattered.
The idea was simple and enormous. Solar and wind power were cheap now, cheaper than coal, but they only worked when the sun shone and the wind blew. The grid needed a way to store that power and release it at night, on still days, during heat waves. It needed batteries. Not phone batteries, not car batteries, but batteries the size of shipping containers, rows and rows of them, standing in fields beside substations. Lithium iron phosphate, safe and durable and cheap. And it needed them to be built in America.
He had raised two hundred and forty million dollars in eighteen months from the best firms on Sand Hill Road. He had been on magazine covers. He had stood on a stage at Aspen in front of an audience of people who ran the world and held up a single battery cell the size of a paperback book and said This is how we win the century, and the video of that talk had been watched six million times.
And then he had tried to actually build the things.
It turned out, as anyone who had spent any real time in the battery business could have told him and several had, that building batteries in America was very, very hard. Not because Americans were stupid or lazy, but because almost everything you needed to do it, the raw materials, the processed chemicals, the cell components, the specialized machinery, the engineers who had spent fifteen years learning how to make the machinery do what it was supposed to, was somewhere else. Mostly in China. Mostly in a few cities in Guangdong and Fujian and Jiangsu whose names Bradley had learned to pronounce badly at investor dinners.
His factory in Fremont had cost a hundred and sixty million dollars. In three years it had produced cells at about a third of the rate he had promised, with roughly four times the defect rate, at almost twice the cost per unit. Every quarter he had explained why the next quarter would be better. Every quarter it hadn't been.
That spring the firms on Sand Hill Road had stopped returning his calls. The magazines had moved on. And someone on the internet had made a meme, which had gone, in its modest way, viral: a photograph of Bradley on the Aspen stage, in his navy suit, holding up a paperback-sized battery cell that someone had digitally set on fire.