Page 101 of Final Drive

“Three days.” She looks at the recorder instead of me. “I’ve written four openings and thrown all of them out. That isn’t normal for me. I’ve been doing this eleven years and I’ve never once had a story handed to me this clean. Clean is how you know somebody built it.”

“So don’t run it.”

“I’m going to run something. If I sit on it he takes it to a wire service and they’ll write it in a morning without calling you at all.” She leans forward. “That’s why I’m in this boat bay on a Sunday. I would rather write the true version. So let’s find out how much of this is true. Your registration says Undifferentiated. Is it accurate?”

“No.”

She lets the silence run, and she doesn’t help me out of it.

“I’m an Omega,” I say.

“When did you know?”

“Fifteen.”

“And when was the registration filed?”

Beckett’s thirty feet away on the dock, and all it would take is my hand on the back of my neck. I keep it in my lap.

“I was sixteen,” I say. “I didn’t file it. My father did.”

Kowalski goes very still.

“Say his name for the recording.”

“James Callahan. He’s an attorney in Atlanta. He filed an amended designation for me the spring I turned sixteen, and he did it since a Beta daughter was easier for my mother to explain at the club than an Omega one. I found out about it two years later. By then I was on suppressants, competing, and being told by both of them that this was a kindness.”

“You understand what you’re doing right now.”

“Yes.”

“Then put it in words I can print.”

“I’m telling a reporter that my father falsified a state designation record for a minor.” I make myself hold her eyes. “He’s licensed. That’s not a family embarrassment, it’s a bar complaint. It could end him.”

“And you’re doing it on the record.”

“With my name on it.”

She sits back and looks at me for the length of about three breaths.

“Why?”

“Because you’d have printed the version where I did it. That’s the story in your envelope. An Omega lied her way onto a men’s team. That version has followed me since Westlake, and it has cost me a school, a captaincy, and every friend I had there. I’ve spent four years letting other people write my designation for me, since correcting it meant giving up my father.” I put my hands flat on the bench. “I’m done paying for a lie I didn’t tell. If the truth wrecks him, he built it.”

The recorder light blinks red between us.

“That’s the piece,” Kowalski says quietly. “You know that.”

“I know.”

“It’s better than what he sent me. It’s more human, it’s checkable, and it puts a name on the part everyone was going to assume was yours.” She rubs her forehead. “The envelope told me you cheated. You’ve just told me somebody traded his daughter’s records for a quiet table at a club, and I can pull the filing date off the state registry in the morning.”

“Then pull it.”

“I will.” She reaches for the recorder, then stops. “Two more, and then I’m going to ask you about the crew, and you’re going to say no, and I want you to say no properly since my editor will ask why I didn’t push.”

“Ask.”