Mireya Brought Two Tiles Into My Little Test Booth

Mireya arrived at 8:54 with two tiles wrapped in brown paper.

Quentin followed her down the stairs.

"We have a proper meeting room," he said.

"I saw it yesterday," she said. "Today I need the booth."

She set the samples on my bench. One had a blue dot. The other had a green dot. She had covered their batch labels so I could not choose by number.

"Can your setup compare these?" she asked.

"Yes. It can't give you a certified product rating."

"Good. Tell me what it can tell us."

I showed her the speaker, the fixed microphone mounts, and the small frame that held each tile in the same place. We could compare reflected sound across a set of tones. We could also weigh the tiles, measure them, and cut them open afterward.

"What about soundproofing?" she asked.

"People call them soundproofing tiles. They mainly cut room echo. A whole wall system needs its own test before we claim it blocks noise."

She opened Quentin's printed deck.

"This says ninety percent less sound in any room."

"That wasn't in my report."

Quentin leaned against the bench. "It's a sales summary."

"Of which test?" she asked.

He pointed to a graph without a caption.

I knew it. It came from an early lab run at one band of sound. Someone had cut off the labels.

"That chart measures absorbed sound at one frequency," I said. "It doesn't mean ninety percent less noise through a wall."

Mireya wrote that down.

I checked the meter before starting. Then I stopped.

"Something is loose."

Quentin sighed. "We don't have time for your rituals."

I played a low tone. A dry tick sounded near the door.

Mireya tilted her head.

"I hear it now."

The bottom latch plate had worked loose. I tightened its screw, then ran the empty-frame check again. The tick was gone.

"Why did that matter?" she asked.

"A rattle makes its own sound. We'd be measuring the door along with the tile."

She touched the brass washer on its red thread.

"And this?"

"The first rattle I ever spent two days blaming on a formula."

She smiled once and let it hang.

The blue-dot tile behaved like our approved sample. The green one reflected much more sound in the middle range. I ran both again in reverse order. Then Mireya asked me to remove and reseat each tile.

The gap stayed.

"Could the backing be different?" she asked.

"Could be. Or the heat cycle. We need to look."

Quentin picked up the green sample.

"These get damp in shipping. That's normal."

"Then let's check the weight," I said.

They were nearly the same. Both had spent the night in the same dry room, according to Mireya's notes.

She gave me permission to cut them.

I used a fine saw. The green tile's little channels had slumped shut. Its core had a hard, shiny band where too much heat had driven binder toward the face.

"What temperature did you design for?" Mireya asked Quentin.

"That depends on scale. We developed a range."

"What range?"

He named the oven's maximum setting.

I waited.

"Would that work?" she asked me.

"No. The manual sets a lower limit and a hold time. The moisture check comes before the heat. You can't trade one for the other."

Quentin folded his arms.

"Paloma handled the fine tuning. The idea was mine."

"Yesterday you said you created the manufacturing method," Mireya said. "Which steps were yours?"

"I raised the money that made this possible."

"That's a different answer."

The booth felt smaller with all three of us beside it.

Mireya uncovered the labels. Blue came from my retained pilot batch. Green came from a sales carton Quentin had handed her himself.

"He said this was current production," she told me.

I read its number: F22.

I had marked F22 for rework eleven days earlier.

My stomach tightened. There had been forty-eight tiles in that lot.

"I need the hold sheet," I said.

Quentin pushed away from the bench. "This is becoming a witch hunt."

"No," Mireya said. "It's becoming a batch review."

She asked me for the signed process manual and the original test files. I gave her the approved version through Ruth's secure upload link, as the license allowed for deal review. I kept a list of every file.

Quentin went upstairs without another word.

I checked the rework shelf. The F22 carton was gone.

In its place sat a shipping slip with a customer's name and a handwritten order: Release Hold, QH.