Chapter 3: The Mandate Nobody Offered

The stairs from forty-seven to forty-three take approximately four minutes at a measured pace, assuming no one stops you. No one stopped me. The corridor was empty in the way that post-emergency corridors go empty — everyone having compressed into the same three rooms to perform the particular theater of controlled response, leaving the building's unimportant bones to do their quiet structural work without an audience.

My office is the third door on the left past the elevator bank, wedged between a storage room and what was briefly designated a server overflow space before Tony had a better idea and the servers got relocated to somewhere with better cooling. The door has my name on it in a label-maker font that Carol applied herself one Sunday morning and which I have never replaced because the crooked angle of the E pleases me every time I see it.

E. MARSH — CONSULTING