"Enough," I say, leaving my cubicle, facing him in the hall like some gunslinger in a western.

Heads spin—my coworkers', the Elite facilitators'. The office air crackles.

"You want a scapegoat? Right here. I'm the one who disappeared. Prisha is my direct report, and you're not going to stand here and bludgeon her with bogus right-wing talking points."

By degrees, Jim Davis's eyes shift to me. "Where did you disappear to?"

"Bathroom."

"You were gone forty-eight minutes."

"What do you have, stopwatches on us?"

He ignores this. "You were not in the bathroom for forty-eight minutes."

"I got sidetracked, made myself tea up on ten. The executive floor has those fancy loose tea—oolong. I had an impromptu brainstorm."

"A brainstorm by yourself?"

"Yep."

My stomach growls. My left hip hurts from standing, but I'm not about to sit now.

Davis asks, "Any useful insights?"

"Could be," I say. "I need to catch up with my team. Bounce some concepts around, figure out what sticks and where."

Mulling this, he fingers his chunky glasses. I have the stray notion that he's activating a truth-detecting feature of the specs, some military-prototype overlay that tells him my statements have a 97.2% chance of being lies.

"Returning to Miss Agarwal," he says. "She is a recent hire, correct?"

"Relatively."

"The hiring decision was yours?"

"Mine and Susan's."

He pulls a faux-thoughtful face. "You believed Miss Agarwal was the best individual for the job?"

"We didn't believe it. She was."

"Best resume? The most experience, outperformed all other candidates in interviews?"

The pig says it without saying it: did we give her special treatment? Did that second X chromosome get her the job?

A throat clears behind me. I turn. Paul Gribbe is standing outside his office, watching. He gives me a significant look. I remember his advice from before. Play it cool—and that was before Cecil and I had our dumpster adventure.

Still. Gender studies was one of my majors at MIT. Now Jim Davis is going to smirk like he's won the point, reducing a complex topic and decades of scholarship to a playground piss-off?

"Let's talk about your qualifications. Where was your primary education?"

"Military academies."

"Explains the fashion," I say under my breath, then aloud, "U.S. military academies?"

Davis smiles into the question, rigid faced, eyes like blades. Does he suspect I know about the Eastern European ties? Does he care?

Before he can respond, Carter Kotanchek breezes in from the elevators.

"Alrightee, what'd I miss?" One cuff of his suitcoat is rolled; one isn't. "On track? Slayin' it?"

Carter's long-legged strides seem to put off wind. He comes to stand beside me, eyes sweeping the space for takers. Paul pats his paunch absently. I'm certainly not saying a word.

Finally, Jim Davis does.

"Checkpoint #3 was missed. We have just concluded our root-cause analysis, and I was preparing to discuss consequences."

Carter winces like he just shanked his three-iron from the fairway. "And?"

Davis checks offstage with Katie Masterson, whose lips press together. "Each member of the engineering team will have 10% of his, or her"—nodding obnoxiously to me—"Q4 options seized. The next missed checkpoint will mean half."

A groan rolls through the room.

Jared calls, "Everyone, or just the algorithm team?"

"Everyone. You succeed or fail as a unit. Although"—Davis singles out Prisha with his eyes—"if an individual repeatedly falls short of expectation, further sanctions are possible."

Jared rips off his trucker hat. Prisha looks ready to crawl underneath her chair.

Personally, I am unmoved about the options. There's no way in hell that stands up once Susan gets back. She'll set things right. It's like a Hasbro steering wheel, something for Davis to twirl and honk and pretend with.

Carter Kotancheck—a richie with no need of options himself—isn't perturbed either. The next Elite news, though, wallops him.

"A second missed checkpoint would place FPP-1 in jeopardy," Davis says. "Consistent, repeatable work-processes are a core requirement of the certification standard."

Carter swears into his armpit. "We gotta get FPP-1, team! Got to."

Watching his head tick back and forth, and watching Davis watching his reaction, I have questions. About a billion.

If Elite Development is not a corporate training outfit, if they're instead an arm of some foreign entity, what does that make Carter Kotanchek? A conduit? A conspirator?

How much of the truth does he know? And what's in it for him? Is this a power grab, Carter using Eastern European heavies to overthrow Susan? The timing fits, Susan off at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Maybe Blackquest 40 is a canard, an impossible project we have no chance of completing, our failure providing the pretext for Susan getting fired.

My reptilian brain wants this, man does it ever, that straightforward co-villain to despise alongside Davis ... but logically, I can't quite make it fly. I keep going back to the code. That algorithm. The seven-variable matrix.

Purpose.

I felt purpose in the code. It can't be throwaway work. It matters. Somehow.

Now, as my coworkers grumble over lost options, I decide to vocalize one of my questions. "Say, where'd you guys meet?"

Carter gets stumped-dog eyebrows. I think I see Jim Davis flinch, the slightest indication of alarm in the hollows of his face.

"Just curious," I say. "Some tech conference? Random karaoke night?"

Davis says, "The history of my association with Mr. Kotancheck is unimportant. Recall our previous discussion of muda, the quest to remove all inessential—"

"Was it essential we all hear your backwards dogma about diversity? And those rote curriculums in Southeast Asia?"

He has no answer for this.

I press, "Tell us—who cares, water cooler chitchat. How'd you meet?"

Again Davis balks. In the silence, the constant thrum of monitors and hard drives seems to swell. It gets awkward. People are looking around sideways—really, why can't he answer?

Carter Kotanchek, ever plugged into the social dynamics of a room, jumps in, "Believe you're right, Deb. Believe it was a conference. Moscone Center. Symposium on the intersection of military and tech. My old general buddy introduced us."

His old general buddy?

I ask, "Chum of yours from Carnegie Mellon?"

Carter's eyes betray nothing at all, zip. "That's right."

"Did Paul know him?" I twist around and spot my boss, who studied at Carnegie with Carter and Susan. "Paul, I can see you in that ROTC scene. Friend of yours too?"

Paul frowns, looking like somebody just handed him a McGriddle without the maple flavoring. Folds appear in his forehead.

"Frat brother of mine," Carter says. "He and Paul wouldn't have crossed paths."

The sight of CK Slick on his heels like this cheers me. Adrenaline kicks in, pulling me out of the trough I sank into after the garage/dumpster exertion. I was going to do my digging on Elite under the radar, but now I'm thinking ... why? Emotions are running high. Maybe Davis will slip. Mikhail's body is not well-hidden; I could be found out at anytime, hauled off in cuffs. This might be my best shot.

I take a stride toward Jim Davis. "Does Elite still do military trainings?"

"We maintain a diverse client list."

"Gotcha. Wouldn't want to go all soft in the middle, aye?"

Davis allows a smile.

"Ever bring weapons to a training?" I ask.

"Of course."

"Of course?"

"We are training you in software and optimizations, we brought computers," Davis says. "We train soldiers, we bring weapons."

I nudge Carter. "Wonder if that's all they brought, computers. Was equipment discussed in advance? Are they allowed to have guns on-site?"

This, possibly, takes it too far. The engineer who sits next to Minosh—Patton? James?—has flinched into a corner at the word "guns."

"I—well, I wouldn't know," Carter says. "They're total pros, I'm sure they bring whatever the exercise requires."

I huff involuntarily. Yeah, pros. Pros armed for a minor coup.

Davis seems to note my reaction. Face darkening, he transfers his stressball from his left hand to his right. "Can we agree these questions have gone beyond water cooler chitchat?"

At this point, I back off. Davis too dials it down, saying the time has come to look forward and devise a plan to make checkpoint #4. He invites Jared and me to lead the exercise. As my pulse slows, I recall his comments about "further sanctions" on "individuals who repeatedly fall short of expectations." I decide it's not fair to place Prisha—in the country on a precarious H-1 visa—and the rest of my team in jeopardy, no matter what beefs I have with Elite.

A dozen of us from Codewise join Elite coordinators in the Latrine. There I get my first taste of the trainers' catering, and I must admit: it's sublime. Salmon cutlets that flake like pastry, artisanal rolls, tabbouleh so bright-tasting my empty belly cheers. It's bizarre to be assembling sandwiches on a china plate after what's happened in the garage—on some level, I know this corporate gentility cannot hold. But man, these sandwiches. I wolf three by the time we've settled on a workplan.

Afterward, we break to our respective module teams. I find Prisha hate-typing at her workstation. Seeing me, she sniffs and pulls around a second chair.

"Thank you for stopping that," she says. "I—I wasn't sure it was my place to defy him."

"And he knew that. Bullies seek out targets who're safe." I mime shooing away a fly, then borrow her keyboard to punch up the Blackquest code. "He'll get his. Believe me, when Susan shows up? It's coming back at that dude hard."

I walk Prisha through the new plan, and together we review the remaining pain points. Generally I am not a hand-holder, providing my engineers lots of space, not troubling over how they're interpreting my sometimes manic/scatter-shot guidance. Now, though, I go with a softer touch. That matrix of variables won't transform? I can take a crack. Jared was being stubborn about what his team would pass off to us? No sweat, I'll pay him a visit next.

When I tell her this last, she rears back in her chair and looks past me. Shoot—I've laid it on too thick. I did the same thing in June when I was inviting her to my diversity meeting, explaining how important I felt it was that women support each other in the workplace. I talked about being gay and an outsider in Corporate America, and not buying into their myths and double-talk. She leaned slightly away with an expression that said, Ummm, okay, can you just say which conference room it's in again?

"Or whatever," I say. "You can handle Jared yourself too, I know you're-"

"Deb," she interrupts.

Keeping her shoulders perfectly still, she moves her eyes farther up the hall. I realize she wasn't responding to my words at all. She was looking over my head at the leaders from Elite.

"They are talking about you," she whispers. "All of them."