Jim Davis balks at first, explaining that Paul's timeout is meant to simulate "full removal from the project, military-grade incarceration." When I explain back that I can do what needs doing without consulting Paul; it just might take an extra two hours of guesswork, he relents.

I rip the duct tape from the jamb and blow into the kitchenette.

It's grim. I couldn't see the full scene through the door glass, black tarps masking the windows. Paul's wrists are zip-tied to the table. Plastic chords looped through AV cutouts allow roughly enough space for them to roll perpendicular, but no more. The pantry and sink areas are tarped-off, limiting him to maybe an 8' by 5' area. The lighting feels cruelly bright now, though the bulbs seem no different. The only item in sight is a stapler—center of the table, jaws open, vaguely menacing with its metal guts exposed.

I bite the corner of my lip. "Paul, oy. You're in here because of me, right? The badge—they blamed you for accessing the journal entr—"

"We can still make the next checkpoint," Paul cuts in, louder than necessary.

I pinch my eyes. He angles his half-donut-bald head toward a corner of the room, where a round lens peers down from a silver box.

He beckons me closer. There aren't any other chairs so I hop up onto the tabletop, legs dangling over. Then I shuffle around, Paul directing me with small moves of the eyes and shoulders until my back blocks both our faces from the lens.

I whisper, "I'm so sorry, Paul. I should have been quicker."

"Don't apologize. I took the heat on purpose." He looks down at his wrists, chapped where the zip-ties have rubbed. "We can't build this software without you. You see what they're doing—injections, our stock options. Who knows what else."

Finishing, he drops his gaze onto my toes—which are apparently too close to resist, even under such dire circumstances.

"How'd they even believe you?" I ask. "You were on 2 the whole time."

"I'm not certain they do. I believe they're turning a blind eye for the same reason: they know that if you were here instead, the project would have virtually no chance of success."

He recounts the last hour on the engineering front. While I was digging through the Accounting labyrinth, the team was treading water. Jared's module has been stuck at 25% unit-test compliance. Half his interfaces don't have a single line of code committed against an implementation, and to Paul's knowledge, the prototype hasn't escaped its sandbox—the overriding goal of that piece of the program—once.

I ask how Prisha is doing on our optimization piece.

"Somewhat better," Paul says. "But Elite wants 80% compliance by 7:00 tonight, and she'll need a giant leap to get there."

I push my tongue high up my cheek.

He continues, "Q4 options vanish at 7:00. They start borrowing against Q1 at midnight. That money, I—if that goes away, I probably have to switch my girls to another school."

"This outfit is controlled by Russian interests." I briefly explain about Voronezh. "Whatever they're doing here—whatever we're doing—is in the service of a hostile foreign entity."

My eyes pulse with zeal while his, once again, fall to my feet.

Really? Paul's been great today, but come on already. We're discussing the seizing of our company by armed oligarghs and he can't muster the willpower to suppress his pervy fetish?

"Stop," I say. "Could you just not stare at my feet? For two minutes? I get that workplace-harassment culture isn't top of mind right at this moment, but please. It creeps me out."

His whole body stiffens. His eyes snap forward like he's just taken a wave of ice water. "I—er, no it isn't your, um, feet ..."

I wait for him to elaborate. Paul stutters and cycles through a range of pukish expressions, his skin turning red and green at once.

"... sometimes you're, well, it can be very hard to look at you. At your eyes. They get so, oh, intense I suppose, and I've never liked managing anyway, and—but ... I guess I developed this habit of looking down, which you've been interpreting as ... harassing ... oh God, Deb, I apologize."

I cross my ankles and avert my eyes, which suddenly feel weaponized. Some balloon is my chest is deflating, fizzling out. I feel sick. Besides landing this man in pseudo-jail, I have been ascribing the worst proclivities of a gender to him when all he's guilty of is struggling with eye contact.

"That's cool, Paul—my bad. I'll get over myself," I say. "So what should I do here? What do you want me to do?"

He takes another second composing himself, flattening his bound hands, breathing. These type of allegations pack a punch in the modern workplace. When he seems recovered, he looks out the door glass. In the distance, Minosh is peeking over his monitor at us.

"Pull us though." He nods to the workers. "That's our team out there. The two of us, we're responsible. I know you try to help people. Carebnb. Your mom. The engineers, they aren't homeless or destitute, but they need help. They really do."

This curbs my warm 'n' fuzzy mood toward Paul. I know nothing of his politics, but this statement has a whiff of something. I hope he isn't aligned with Jared's man rights cohorts, who—Raven has observed on reconnaissance—whine on message boards about reverse discrimination in Silicon Valley.

The possibility revs my outrage motor, but I stop myself. No. No wasting time down moot intellectual paths. No impulsive moral quests, or therapeutic popping off. No conflagrations.

I tell Paul I'll do what I can and return to the cubicles. I veer toward Prisha's, thinking to convene the module leaders and make a plan, but the enforcer falls in beside me and walks us to my own like some bailiff. I allow it.

I am committed to no conflagrations.

I let him recede to the wings, wherever Elite has set up its thug bullpen, and hike up onto my desk. Pain stabs my hip and I stagger, spilling a few droid-Hot Wheels from their bin. I punch the spot, which relieves or at least distract me from the pain. Then, standing upright with my monitor at knee-height, I test the cubicle border.

Feels sturdy. The borders are two-ply, my neighbor and I each have one. There's a little flex, but it should take my 100-odd pounds.

Using various Java and LISP manuals for a step, I climb up. Raven and I are at eye-level now. She winks. (Closing her camera's aperture, then opening back up at quarter-speed.) From this vantage-point, I command all three cube farms.

"Yo, eyes and ears please!" I begin. "We're not allowed to gather in the Latrine, so this will have to do. Look I don't wanna be here, you don't wanna be here—so let's build this software and get these joyless jerks on their way."

Keeping a wide stance, I check in with each module leader. Minosh's small end-piece is furthest along. We discuss tweaking the memory usage, then I slap my hands and tell him to go with it. Prisha next. I bend low and turn my head upside-down to check UnitTracker; she's only at 47%. A associate engineer, two levels down, has the promising idea to shade our lead optimization coefficient based on the last n results. I talk it forward with him. Why just the lead? Let's shade them all, dynamically, with exponential smoothing. Prisha thinks it'll get us most of the way there.

Next up is the injection module.

Jared.

"Alright, so for unit compliance we're seeing ..." I bend to confirm what I already know from Paul. "25%. And we need 80% by 7:00. That's a big gap. How're we going to close it?"

Jared, slumped in the adjacent cubicle, murmurs indistinctly.

I say, "What?"

From here I can see the button on top of his trucker hat, brown with grime.

"I got some ideas."

"Good ones?"

He shrugs.

"Okay, let's talk ideas. Have you checked them into the repository?" I begin lowering myself—if he's checked in code, I can read it on my machine.

But Jared hasn't. "I've been bouncing stuff around, subroutine here and there."

"On your laptop or desktop?"

"Laptop."

I flit my fingers. "Here, pass it up."

"You can't just assume my laptop," he scoffs.

"If you're not doing anything useful with it? Sure I can."

I motion again for Jared to give it. He frumps his arms closed.

I stalk the cubicle border, crossing from mine to his. Mom never signed me up for gymnastics, but I got decent balance skateboarding. Nearby engineers gasp as the panels sway and rattle. Graham appears from the direction of the elevator bank. He stops short, meeting my eye with a simper.

Jared says, "You're not taking my laptop. You think because you made yourself a bunch of flying toaster-gizmos, and because you're like this demographic unicorn who's everybody's darling, that you just get whatever you want?"

I am standing above him now. The whole of the second floor is silent, excepting the ambient hum of monitors and LEDs overhead. The unicorn crack—which he'll undoubtedly share with his oppressed online brethren at some later date—bothers me less than the juxtaposition of Raven with a kitchen appliance.

I lower myself down his cubicle border. My sandal kicks over the Slurpee cup he keeps his code highlighters in.

"Do you remember those needles you were pooping your pants about half an hour ago? If this injection module of yours doesn't start injecting? Quickly, like it's supposed to?" I mime pushing a plunger. "Yeah. Finish the scenario yourself."

This could be construed as conflagration, I realize.

Jared passes up his laptop.

I carry it back along the cube borders to my workspace, plunk down, and read what he's got. Reviewing code while others are waiting can be nerve-wracking, but I go fast, tracking his logic, silently cursing his terribly non-uniform tabs. The intersections of the borders make passable seats; I sit with a butt cheek on two of the four radiating panels, feet on the remaining two, laptop on my knees.

Graham wanders over. "Bit of an unconventional spot for peer review."

"Is this verboten?" I call down. "Nobody said anything about the workspace-tether policy having a vertical component."

"I'll give you a pass." He fingers the tip of his turned-up collar. "How's it going? Anything I can help with?"

I look around Jared's laptop, considering Graham. The tenor of our interactions so far has been conspiratorial, Graham the cool, understanding bro to Jim Davis's taskmaster dad. I've seen Davis reprimand him. When they were pursuing me before, I saw Davis thump his chest on Raven's livestream.

Is this real, though? Or does every word I say to Graham end up repeated back to Davis in some backroom debrief?

"If you're offering, yeah." I tap my fingernail off Jared's code onscreen. "This sandbox we're breaking into. It sweeps the directories for .bl files and runs them all. Why? What kinda system does that?"

"It's an emerging architecture," Graham says. "Much in vogue now among military and utilities programmers. It facilitates multiple processes in a single system, allowing deployments to occur without dependency. Frequently, as here, the system are coupled with non-deterministic gatekeeping, which prevents bad actors from gaining access with Trojan .bl files. A foreign file may work one time and not the next. Hacking against such variability is quite difficult. The systems are rarely penetrated."

Behind me, Jared says, "I did. I got through once."

Graham barks a chuckle. "'Once' being the operative word. The Blackquest requirement is 100%-repeatable success."

He looks back to me, ready to dismiss the slovenly slacker.

But I stay on Jared. "Wait. What happened? How'd you get through?"

"I threw a bunch of params at it. Varied the header strings."

"How many headers are there?"

"Fourteen."

"So you varied each of them? That must've taken forever."

"Yeah, three hours. One at a time. You have to do it like a thousand times to find the right combo, and then it changes."

Graham brushes his windswept hair off eyes full of disdain. "As I explained. The strategy has no chance in a live system."

But I'm not so sure. I curl forward into a ball, rocking slightly, letting Jared's solution rattle around my brain. I imagine it working ... see it knifing through the filters ... sticking itself onto the main thread ... handing off its payload ...

"As much as it pains me to say this," I say, turning to Jared. "You're right." My mouth feels ashy. "You do it a thousand times."

Jared clearly doesn't trust this, face pulled sideways. Graham too—everyone on 2 in fact—looks at me like I'm about to twist-honk his nose.

I hop down from my perch and run to the large hallway whiteboard. The scarred enforcer makes a move to stop me, but Graham—with surprising strength—lashes him fast to his side.

I start sketching. As my hand arcs and darts and draws symbols, a flowchart materializes. Forests are sprouting inside me. Data leafs up my bones and between tendons. People ditch their cubicles to come watch. Faces change from blank to curious, to confused, to hopeful, to stunned, and finally to awed. The algorithm uses a single file that stamps out versions of itself, each with different header strings, each capable of the same self-replication, bombarding the host system with .bl files until one works.

Jared looking at me, stupefied. "That's ... yeah. Yeah."

He turns around to face his module-mates, who're all grinning. The approach is clear as San Francisco Bay in spring. Parallelism is exactly how to beat the sandbox. It's audacious and elegant in the way of the best Computer Science solutions.

"Let's do it," one says.

Another reaches in his pocket to snap a cellphone photo of the whiteboard, but of course Elite took all those.

"Nah, we're good." Jared taps his head. "I got this."

Watching them go, I feel the day's first glimmer of hope. Up to now, it's been all threats and glower. Maybe Blackquest is doable. Maybe we can keep raising our game, jump through every hoop and sort of sail past Voronezh altogether. Part of me knows this is mere post-epiphany euphoria, but other parts are telling it to shut up, just for a sec.

Graham nods impressively. "I didn't expect you'd get there."

I cap my whiteboard marker, realizing I'll need more magic for my own module—the optimization piece. "Get where?"

"Out of the sandbox. I'd started to believe it was unbeatable."

"There's no such thing as unbeatable security."

"Apparently."

Graham sighs, palming the back of his great hair. Is he sad?

"Cheer up," I say as we walk a few steps together back toward my cubicle. "You're our liaison, right? Aren't you supposed to be rooting for us? Why do you care if we beat this lame sandbox?"

He glances behind him, then answers, "Because I built it."