Jian understands now, in a way he didn't when he was sixteen, that his father's work was never ordinary. The PLA has many branches. Some of them wear uniforms. Some of them attend conferences. Some of them build networks across oceans, slowly, carefully, invisibly.
And now Inferthermic has caught someone's attention.
"Hey," Maddy says. She's watching him, her feet still on the table, her expression softer than her usual manic energy. "You okay?"
Jian sets the phone down, face-down on the table, like that will make it disappear.
"Fine," he says. "Just thinking about my father."
Alex looks up from his laptop, where he's already drafting the Anthropic pitch. "You want to talk about it?"
Jian shakes his head. He doesn't want to talk about it. He wants to go back to five minutes ago, when the Cencora email was the biggest thing in his universe, when his future felt like something he was building rather than something that was being built around him.
But the future doesn't work that way. He learned that from his father, even if he learned it sideways, through absences and silences and the weight of unspoken things.
"I should call him," Jian says. But he doesn't reach for the phone.
Maddy pulls her feet off the table and sits up straight. "You know we're here for you, right? Whatever this is."