Meetings had never been her strong suit. She felt like she was playing an away game whenever she sat down in a conference room. Her awareness of this got in the way and turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It had always been thus. The fact that the world was ending changed nothing. As Sparky kept ticking down the list, telling each person what they would be doing in the coming weeks, she kept feeling more and more the point of focus precisely because she hadn’t been focused on yet. And when it became clear that she was last on Sparky’s list, she had a good long while, as he talked to Margaret and Jun and Marco, to wonder what that meant. Being Dinah, her first assumption was that she was considered so important that she was being saved for last. But by the time Sparky finally spoke her name, she had arrived at a different guess as to what was happening. Her heart was already thumping and her pinkies tingling, her tongue bulky in her mouth.