His head was glistening bald. Ink stains spotted his military shirt and half a dozen scuffs dented his collar. His bloodshot gaze, buried behind glasses that sat too low on his nose, darted between Sarah and the paper. He took off his glasses. “Should I shred this request or are you going to, Sarah?” Avery leaned back and covered his face with both palms, thumbs massaging his temples in opposite circles. “A two-day vacation is out of the question. Anything else?” “I do insist you reconsider.” “The Atlas synthesis can’t afford an hour of downtime while we’re staging billions of mutation clusters.” The palms over the face distorted Avery’s voice into a mutter. “But even if I were to derive the correct sequence, at once,” Sarah’s fingers snapped to illustrate her words, “I’d still need to test the formula in the field, unless we figured out how to bring the ocean to DC.
