The relief that sweeps through me is water through a burning house. Muscles I didn't know I had unclench—behind my ribcage, in between my toes. My brain's gray matter has gained another quarter-inch of space on all sides. I close my eyes and inhale deeply, and my mouth stays open, basking in the changed air.

Susan Wright has the type of presence that bends the space-time continuum. Hosts forget their reservation lists at the crook of her eyebrow. Hard-hitting financial journalists become fawning lapdogs under the influence of her silky answers. When I only knew her from TV, I figured her power was strongest over men, but I've since seen it wielded over employees' daughters, female publicists, Uber drivers.

Anyone and everyone.

My fatigue is gone. I start running. Through the cube farms, rumbling their borders with my clompy strides, elbows and shins flailing.

People look. Graham cuts short a manly stretch to crane his neck.

I pay no attention. I pop the doors to the lobby balcony with taut wrists, hitting the stairs in full stride, three at a time, racing toward Susan like a magnet after its mate.

I've reached the bottom of the staircase when Jim Davis appears at the balustrade.

"Stop!" he commands. "You've made admirable progress, but the midnight checkpoint ..."

I don't hear the rest, running, rushing, seeking. Susan is pushing through the lobby double-doors. The dark sedan she arrived in motors off. Elite's doorman blips off a walkie-talkie and greets her with hands professionally over his belt buckle.

They confer. Susan is average height, but the cashmere coat, purse, and laptop bag give her an outfitted heft that dwarfs the yellow shirt. Her eyes laser into his face. The toes of his boots turn out. He breaks his hands apart to fidget an earlobe.

She's dispensing with him as my front sandal hits the lobby hardwood. We lock eyes. She's been on a plane for twelve hours but there's not a trace of blear in them, matched orbs of flawless green seaglass. I bound past Security Kyle knowing I'm headed for a cheesy movie hug and not caring. Susan drops her bags and spreads her arms, and I rush in.

"I got your messages," she says, her mouth somewhere in my yellow spikes.

I grope back in memory to when I would've left her phone messages. Oh right—this morning before the kickoff meeting, about a hundred years ago.

"It's a coup d'etat—they're Russian, they money's out of Russia!" As we separate from the clutch, my heads is light and warm with her scents. "Nobody knows what it is, what we're building. But it's evil. I know evil code and this is serious evil."

Words are tumble backwards out of my mouth, landing on each other sideways.

Susan brushes the welt under my temple, mouth puckered with concern. "Who's Russian?"

"The trainers! Elite Development, it's a front. They're paying us. Carter—I think Carter's been taking their money on the sly."

She takes my hand, her long fingers wrapping my runty ones, and guides me to the bench near Sempiternity. We sit beside the gurgling water statue, and I tell my story. Stretched like a squirrel-pelt over a server rack. Jim Davis reciting my bio, shoving his box at my face. Trying to leave and being dragged back inside. The weapons cache in the van—once again omitting Mikhail and the dumpster. The redacted journal entries. Amphetamines. Paul and the kitchenette.

Susan listens with evident revulsion. She leans forward over crossed legs, head cocking a few degrees more with each disclosure—until at last it hangs parallel to the floor.

Jim Davis has made his way downstairs. "Miss Wright, I assure you that whatever Miss Bollinger is telling you—"

"Deb is speaking now," Susan says. "Which means you shouldn't be."

Davis passes his stressball from one hand to the other. "Certainly. But perhaps you should consider a different perspec—"

"Perhaps you should begin gathering your things." The CEO's voice resounds through the high spaces of the lobby. "Given what I'm hearing from Deb, I think it's likely this exercise is over. I'll be around shortly to evaluate, but you might get a head start."

She dispatches him with a sniff. Davis visibly struggles against his body—his shoulders flex, cheeks flush. The stressball disappears in his fist. I have an irrational urge to tug Susan's sleeve and explain this singular weirdness.

Finally, like a dog overcoming an urge, Davis retreats.

Susan twists on the onyx we're sitting on to look me square. "I cannot express enough sorrow for all you've been subjected to, Deb. I signed off on this training. Carter told me it would be tough—he told me about the forty hours, said this company had the logistics of the thing nailed and everybody'd be comfortable. Clearly he was wrong. I was wrong. I should've insisted on being here for the duration, to prevent these ..."

She glances queerly about the building, as though considering a foreign planet rather than this company she shepherded from startup to global powerhouse.

"Abuses," she finishes. "My god. There's just no other word."

Sempiternity burbles on. The bench feels warm underneath me, Susan's heartbreak seeming to travel through it into my body.

I ask, "What're we gonna do?"

She smiles at my use of we. "First, we gather information. Once we understand the full extent of the situation—and Carter will have to be central to that effort—we'll see about next steps. From what you've said, it sounds like the police will need to be involved."

Susan shrugs out of her cashmere coat and doubles it smartly over her forearm, starting for the elevator bank. "Deb?"

I linger at the water statue. This might be the time to come clean about my dead thug, while we're bandying about atrocities. I raise up on tiptoes to tell her.

Then stop. I can't. She is such a righteous steamroller right now, and I refuse to diminish her power. Going up against Jim Davis, with all he has riding on the success of Blackquest 40, she's going to need it.

I follow Susan to the elevators. She presses Up, then remembers she needs to email her Davos attaché—several participants asked for a soft copy of her presentation.

She takes out her phone.

"Don't!" I say. "Elite put a block on the network. It'll fry your cell."

"Fry my cell?"

I explain, as non-technically as possible, Elite's rootkit/virus booby-trap. Susan stashes her phone with an icked expression, and together we ride up to E-Wing. Several yellow shirts encounter us; none stop us or even say a word. At her office, Susan tosses her coat to the damask couch and pecks briefly on her keyboard. I wait. Done, she smacks her hands as though shedding cracker crumbs.

"Well?" Her eyes are hungry. "Time to go right some wrongs."

It's 1789 and I am ready to storm the Bastille. "Absolutely."

We ride down to the second floor. Susan is fuming before the elevator doors have fully receded, blasting inside, hips jutting. Every eye turns our way. A rubber plant bounces in her wake. The overhead lights—I swear to this—dim like power is being siphoned off by her passing aura. I follow like her first samurai, chest full, fingers loose and ready.

Jim Davis steps in her path. I have a premonition of them colliding, destroying each other in a supernova.

Susan speaks from ten yards out. "Paul Grippe, where is he?"

"Mr. Grippe engaged in behavior detrimental to the project," Davis says. "He was placed in detention. His term ends in thiry—"

"Where." Her lips build the word up from its sounds, one brick at a time.

Davis scratches furiously at his side, a herky-jerky, cross-body move. Then his mouth several moments without sound. Finally, his arm raises toward the kitchenette.

We go there. Before Susan's arrival, preparations were beginning for bed. A wheeled platform of cots appeared. Several people untucked shirts or took off shoes. Now, there is none of that. All activity has frozen, a kind of expectant paralysis settling over the office.

Is this it? Can she do it?

Are we about to go home?

"Abominable," Susan mutters, catching sight of Paul. She walks in sliding a hand down her face. Paul is looking green.

"What's wrong with your elbows?" she asks. "Why are you sitting ..."

She trails off as Paul turns his wrists against the zipties, showing her the red seams gnawed into his skin.

"This is barbaric. Deb"—she hoods her eyes with one hand as though unable to look, makes a snipping gesture with the other. "Can you, please?"

I find scissors at the nearest engineer's desk and cut Paul free. He rubs his wrists, then tries standing too quickly and has to sit again.

Now Susan stands in the middle of the kitchenette, considering in turn the tarps on the windows, the walled-off pantry and sink areas, the stapler. She squints at its springs and staples. "Did they—was this used in some way?"

Paul shakes his head.

The answer only seems to confuse Susan, who begins pivoting in circles now as though deciding where to start, or what to hit.

"How did this happen?"

I can't tell if she's addressing me or Paul, or just the world.

Before either of us answers, I hear the thud of Jim Davis's boots. He approaches the kitchenette threshold with a cardboard box.

The box is back.

Davis says, "Our man at the door should have collected your phone, Miss Wright."

Susan blinks a few times, then shifts the orientation of her head and blinks more. "You expect me to surrender my phone?"

"These are the terms of—"

"To you?" Venom drips from the word.

Jim Davis raises his box. "These are the terms of participation. We've found in past exercises that when upper management adopts a behavior, it filters down. Compliance is contagious."

Susan blows past him out of the kitchenette, into view of the cube farms. She faces him with hands on hips. "Tell me exactly what sort of corporate trainers you are."

"Extreme Readiness. We prepare organizations with the most grueling, most demanding—"

"Stop," she cuts in. "I don't care what you prepare for—I just wanted to confirm you weren't communications or body language trainers. Because if you were?" An airy note comes into her voice, which strikes me—bizarrely, inappropriately—as sexy. "You'd realize how moronic it is, asking me for one damn thing right now."

She asks Minosh politely if she can use his desk, then climbs up to survey the whole floor—like I did before, only without needing to risk life and limb standing on a border. Blond billows of hair whip as she scans the outlying workspaces. It's gotten ragged. Printer trays gaping open. Chairs toppled and jumbled together. Hairdos matted and smushed. I only notice now, possibly in contrast to Susan's lovely scent, that the whole place stinks like the darkest corner of a Doritos bag.

After a solid minute, Susan turns to glare at Jim Davis. She's barely recognizable—rage twists the beautiful hollows of her face. For a moment I think she'll lunge at him.

Instead, she stands tall again.

"From the bottom of my heart," she calls out, "I apologize. I apologize on behalf of management. I apologize for myself. This is ghastly. None of this should have been allowed, but we're fixing it. I—I mean, have you been offered showers? Any of you? Change of clothes?"

Only silence answers her. Susan raises her brow to me and Paul.

I say, "Nobody. No."

"It's close to midnight. Have you spoken with your families? Spouses? Reassured them you're not lying at the bottom of a ditch somewhere?"

Around the room, chins fall. There is a kind of collective gloom as Susan articulates the horrors of Blackquest 40, but a glint of hope too. Because finally somebody—somebody who's part of the corporate regime instead of a marauder like me—is acknowledging the truth. Spoken aloud like this, it cannot continue. It can only end. My heart feels all this.

My eyes, though, see yellow shirts massing in the periphery.