Page 7 of Gryphon

“Surprised them is all. Heard Jeremy asking about me, chimed in with my Big Bad callsign. My squad tagged me as the Big Bad Wolf when I told them about being typecast in a high school play. They were doing Into the Woods. Let’s just say I tried out cause Little Red Riding Hood was one hot chick—dark as midnight with hair bleached to match the summer sun. Turned out well for me, I can tell you that.”

Miranda supposed that his grin could be described as wolf-like, not that she’d ever seen an actual wolf grin. She pulled out her phone and searched on wolf grin image. Photos showed big fangs, bared teeth, and expressions like Meg when she was angry, only much worse. Miranda blanked the screen quickly. Then she cleared the app to make sure the images didn’t stay on her phone. Then she deleted it entirely and told it to reinstall a fresh copy.

Tad Jobson’s grin possessed no discernable relation to a wolf’s except they both had teeth.

He started in on some other story about skits he’d done with the other Marines on long ship-board cruises to pass the time.

Why hadn’t she thought to do this before?

She opened a different browser app to make sure she didn’t see the wolves again, just in case the first one had somehow bookmarked them despite the reinstall. She searched and located a number of charts of dog emotions. Then she sat cross-legged on the foyer carpet with her back against the confusing terracotta palm pot. Meg sat in front of her and Miranda began trying to identify the dog’s emotions.

The first several charts on her phone were very confusing, mostly because there were too many options. The next set didn’t match anything about Meg. That’s when she understood that they’d all portrayed human emotions on a dog’s face; she’d have liked that when she was younger but it didn’t help her with Meg. Miranda discarded those as well. The simplest one turned out to be the best.

Eight basic dog emotions, more than the five she’d been raised with but still manageable. Meg’s eyes were wide open, her tongue lolling out, and she did indeed appear to be smiling as she looked up at Miranda’s face. Happy or excited.

It was good to know.

She waited for Meg to change her expression, but she didn’t. Then she pulled in her tongue and tilted her head to the side without looking away. Miranda found a match. “Oh, look. That’s a curious face.”

Tad squatted down beside her. “Yep, that’s a curious face you got there, buddy.”

“Her name is Meg.”

“Yep, that’s a curious face you got there, Meg.”

Jeremy laughed.

Miranda didn’t understand why a nonconstructive repetition of information was funny.

4

They were halfway through a lecture about best air-safety practices for designing nighttime helicopter landing platforms on offshore drilling rigs.

Miranda, Jeremy, and Tad were riveted. Though only Tad was taking notes, pages of them as if he was trying to copy down the whole lecture.

Holly looked as if she’d rather be at a beauty salon, something she’d once described as a special hell perpetrated on women by insecure men. Her sole concession to society’s pressure was hacking off the bottom of her ponytail with a knife whenever she deemed it too long. Mike’s offers to use actual scissors were always brushed aside as too much trouble.

Thank God they kept these sessions short, twenty-five minutes apiece with a five-minute break between. Images of destruction due to landings on oil platforms under tow and…

Mike closed his eyes. The conference certainly drove home the stupidity of amateurs, the deadly complacency of pros, and the flat-out bizarre ways people managed to die. It was very hard to open them again.

He wanted to stay awake until the next session on Human Factor Failure Methodologies Analysis presented by NASA. The conference chair appeared on the stage as if by magic between one slow eyeblink and the next.

At lunch, he shouldn’t have had the second chocolate mousse cake on top of the big meal but it had just been sitting there. To his left had sat Jeremy and the JAXA team. They’d shifted to English and were discussing metal fatigue and fracture analysis with an enthusiasm usually reserved for overtime play at the Super Bowl.

To his right, the silent Miranda. When he’d stopped her from giving chocolate to Meg because it wasn’t good for dogs, Miranda had refused to eat it herself. It was very good mousse, lighter yet richer than his recipe, which he had no idea how to reproduce despite eating two of them.

And the eyeblink after that, the chairwoman was the one at the microphone, “I’m so sorry for interrupting. Where is Miranda Chase in the audience?”

Mike shook himself alert as Miranda rose slowly to her feet.

“Oh, excellent. Could you please proceed to the back of the room? Sorry for the interruption.” And she was gone.

Miranda was most of the way to sitting back down when Mike caught her arm. “I think she meant now, Miranda.”

“Oh.” She looked once more to the stage where the speaker was trying to recall where he’d left off squeezing every possible word into the twenty-five-minute time frame. “But I’ve only heard half the talk.” Miranda hated incomplete things.

“Would you like me to go for you?”

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