Chapter 9

Warren Cross walked into his own showroom eleven minutes later, and the first thing he did was look at the floor.

I understood that. I'd have looked at the floor too.

He was sixty-one, silver-haired, in a good coat, and he'd clearly been pulled out of a dinner. He shook hands with two VIPs on his way in - automatic, muscle memory - and then he stopped ten feet from the platform and looked up at me sitting on the Sparrow.

"Elias," he said.

"Warren."

"You're supposed to be in New Mexico."

"I've never been to New Mexico."

He nodded slowly, like that confirmed something he'd suspected for a long time.

"Vivian," he said, without turning. "Go home."

"No."

"Go home."

"Dad." She stepped in front of him, and she had her phone in her hand, and her voice was shaking and she didn't care. "Three days ago I found a licensing file in dead storage. Box forty-one. A scanned copy of a 1998 agreement between Apex Moto and the licensor of the Ward cycle. Royalty-free. Perpetual. And there's a clause on page six, in the same type as everything else, and I want you to say it out loud in front of these people, or I will."

Warren Cross said nothing.

So she said it.

"'This license shall terminate automatically upon the removal of the Licensor's name from the Sparrow prototype, or upon the sale, transfer, or export of the prototype outside the state of Texas.'"

The room was very quiet.

"That agreement was signed in 1998," Vivian said. "The plate came off during the restoration, two years ago. That's two years of engines built on a license that no longer exists." She looked at her father. "And the bike flies to Dubai on Monday. Which means both clauses break at once."

Warren Cross put his hands in his pockets.

"The patent expired," he said.

"No," I said.

I took the key out and held it up so he could see the initials.

"The original ran out," I said. "So in 2009 I filed a continuation on the head design - the part that actually makes the Ward cycle work. It's alive, Warren. It's been alive the whole time, and I've paid the maintenance fees every year out of an account in Austin with my name on it and my address on it."

He looked at me then. Really looked.

And I finally understood the thing I'd been circling all night. The reason nobody in this building knew my name. The reason the company website says I died in New Mexico in 2004. The reason my photograph is filed in a box with the vendor receipts.

It wasn't forgetting. Nobody forgets where the money comes from.

It was a decision. Made once, in an office, by a man in a good coat.

"You've had that file since the day you bought this company," I said.

Warren Cross said nothing at all.