Page 66 of The Wish

She wheels Steve’s chair beside Alex, grabs his mouse, and starts clicking through menus.

‘Mmm,’ she mutters.

‘Mmm what?’

‘We rebuilt this entire workflow when we upgraded to version 5 of the renderer. Way cleaner.’

‘Too bad I’m not allowed to use version 5.’

‘You’re not. But I could backport the fix. Technically still version 4 just with a few, shall we say, tweaks.’

‘How long would that take?’

‘Dunno, maybe an hour to merge the code, another hour or two to run the automated system tests, shouldn’t break anything. We were pretty careful when we built it.’

‘You can do that?’

Sarah stands and returns Steve’s chair to his cubicle. ‘Yeah, easy, what source repository are you saving to?

Alex scrambles down one screen reading his reference documentation.

‘Ahh, vol 2 slash Alex slash Phoenix.’

‘Got it. Give me remote access to your machine.’

‘Just fixes only, OK? No product updates or Ian will have my neck.’

‘Can do. I mean, there may be some dependencies, but I’ll work through that. How long did you say you’d been having these problems?’

‘Since I started,’ Alex tells her, feeling like the most incompetent member of the team, not the wunderkind.

‘You’ve got some nice close shots of the lady who is just the social worker but nothing more, I see,’ Sarah says, walking back to her cubicle, winking at Steve.

‘Kelly,’ Alex blurts out. ‘Her name is Kelly.’

He grabs his jacket and helmet, just as Ian sticks his head around the door.

‘GET BACK TO BLOODY WORK!’

He’s met with half a dozen pairs of angry, cold eyes. No one moves. Flustered, he hastily retreats.

Kelly looks up from her desk at a gentle knock on her door. She smiles at Alex, expecting the usual silence and hurried departure.

‘How long have I got?’ he says.

‘For what?’ Kelly asks, concerned at his tone and his appearance. He’s always quite dishevelled, but today he looks as though he’s been in a fight.

‘Sorry, I mean how long does Jesse have?’

‘Alex . . .’

‘Just tell me.’

‘I can’t. You know that.’

‘No. You asked me to come here to make a wish come true for Jesse. Now I don’t want any of your confidentiality crap. Just tell me how long’s she got!’

Kelly stands behind her desk, weighing what she can say. Then, finally: ‘Three, maybe four weeks. Not long.’