Chương 170: The Conversation After

Day one ended, and the noise drained out of the building. The Americans dragged themselves back to the training kitchen without a word between them. Ninety-one points should have been worth celebrating. The two-point gap sat in every throat like a fish bone that would neither go down nor come up. Ethan most of all. He walked to his station without speaking, took off his jacket, and started cleaning his tools. Over and over, mechanical and repetitive, as though the motion could empty his head.

Kira glanced at him, glanced at Chris, and then went quietly to the corner to sort tomorrow's ingredients. She knew comfort would be worth nothing right now. Ethan had to come out of it himself — or Chris had to push him. Chris didn't move in straight away. He poured himself a glass of water and watched Ethan's back. He knew what was going on in there. To a perfectionist who held precision as scripture, a public error in front of the whole world wasn't a lost point.

It was a strike against everything he believed about himself. If that knot didn't come out, tomorrow's Future Kitchen wouldn't have Ethan leading the attack. It would have him as the weakest link on the floor. Late. Kira had gone to bed. Only the two of them were left in the training kitchen. Ethan was still there, holding the same position over the same pair of tweezers, and had been for a quarter of an hour. Chris carried over a mug of hot milk and set it down by his hand.

"Still on the drop of soup?" he said quietly. Ethan's shoulders shifted. He didn't turn around.

"My hand." He got it out at last, badly hoarse.

"It has never shaken in a competition. Not once."

"I know."

"Every day I train temperature, injection, forming. I can hold tolerance to microns and milliseconds. I thought my hand was a machine. Something absolutely reliable." There was self-mockery in it, and confusion under that.

"Today it betrayed me." Chris let him talk.

"I'm not afraid of losing, Chris." Ethan put down the tweezers and turned around. His eyes were shot with red.

"I'm genuinely not afraid of losing. I'm afraid of us losing because of me. I'm afraid of being what drags you and Kira down." This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. For the first time, something fragile came into his voice.

"Everything I'm worth is technique. Precision. If I can't even do that, then what use am I to this team?" The question came up out of the floor of him, and it caught at Chris too. Now he had it — the fear underneath all the other fears. Ethan wasn't afraid of failing. He was afraid of becoming worthless. Arthur's perfect cooking machine had landed exactly on the rawest nerve he had. Chris didn't argue. He picked up the milk and put it in his hands.

"You know what I keep thinking about? That roast chicken. Semifinal." Ethan blinked, thrown by the turn.

"What about it."

"Which piece of high-end molecular work went into it? The centrifuge? The nitrogen?"

"…None of it. It was as plain as cooking gets."

"So why did the woman sitting next to Chairman Benini start crying at the table?" Chris held his eyes.

"Do you think it was your roasting time, accurate to the second? Or your butter weight, accurate to the gram?" Ethan went quiet. The chicken came back to him. It hadn't been a dish. It had been the one bright thing in an entire lonely childhood — his father's clumsy, loving, once-a-year Christmas present.

"She tasted…" It came out with difficulty.

"She tasted what was in it. The story."

"Yes." Chris said it hard.

"She tasted your story. Your memory. What you felt. That's where your strength actually lives, Ethan. Not in a pair of hands as steady as a machine. In a heart that can hurt and be lonely and still be warm." He put a hand on Ethan's shoulder and gripped.

"Arthur can copy technique. He can produce a cleaner sphere than you and a more stable gel than you. Can he copy what it tasted like the year you turned twelve and ate your father's roast chicken for the first time? He can't. He can't even understand the question."

"So you made a mistake. So what?" Chris's voice came up.

"We're people, not machines. People make mistakes. And people can turn a mistake into a flower and a story. That's the biggest single difference between us and them."

"I don't want a perfect cooking machine as a teammate, Ethan." He looked straight at him and said it a word at a time.

"I want you. Something with blood in it, that gets nervous and gets things wrong and can still put its own heart on a plate. The actual Ethan Cole."

"Your technique isn't a blank round fired off to impress people. It's the shell that carries what you feel. Without your precision, Kira's ideas are a castle in the air and my story is a man complaining about nothing. You're our heavy gun. You're the one who breaks the wall. You're not worthless — you're the one thing here nobody can substitute." Ethan's eyes went red at the rim.

He looked at Chris, at the trust and the plain honesty in his face that left no room for argument, and the iceberg that had been sitting on his chest since the bell began to break apart. He'd spent years using a wall of technique to hide how unsafe he felt. He'd believed that if the technique got strong enough, nobody would ever discard him. And tonight Chris was telling him that what was needed here wasn't the technique. It was him.

Ethan lifted a hand and wiped his eyes, and produced a smile that was ugly and enormously relieved.

"All right," he said.

"Then tomorrow they can find out how frightening a man who makes mistakes is when he gets angry." He picked up the milk, which had gone lukewarm, and drank it down in one.

"Let's go take that English clock apart."

"Together." Chris smiled too. They put out their fists in an empty kitchen and knocked them hard together. Day one was over. They were behind, they'd made an error, they'd been pushed to the cliff edge. And the American war machine, the one assembled out of contradiction and uncertainty, locked its last piece into place on the first night of the final. The real war started now.