“You know,” Ruth Anne said, “I worked in the Youngstown store for thirteen years without ever having a problem in the Showroom. But the first day I started here, I got real lost. Not the funny kind of lost, either. This was the scary kind.”

Amy wasn’t listening. She was still smarting over her argument with Basil about the stupid Shop Responsible test. It wasn’t failing that bothered her. It was everyone knowing that she failed.

Ruth Anne kept chattering away. “I was going to visit Diane in Kitchens. You know Diane Darnowsky? She wears all those Santa Claus buttons around Christmastime? Well, I was going out to see her, but I got so turned around, it took me half an hour. My whole lunch break. Scared the dickens out of me. I was panicking, thinking the store was actually moving around behind my back. By the time I reached Diane I just wanted to sit down and cry myself silly. I never went back out on the floor again.”

“Are you serious?” Amy asked. “You’ve been here eleven months and you’ve never gone out on the Showroom floor?”

“You change when you get older,” Ruth Anne said. “You’ll see.”

“It is weird in here with no people,” Amy admitted. Ruth Anne’s nerves were probably rubbing off on her. She started humming the theme from The Twilight Zone: “Doo-dee-doo-doo, doo-dee-doo-doo.”

“Stop, please,” Ruth Anne said. “It’s bad enough without you doing that.”

Amy stopped at a dun-colored information post. A map of the Showroom was painted on the side, with a giant YOU ARE HERE marker right in the middle of Living Rooms and Sofas. “It’s just a big loop like every other Orsk. Just like Youngstown,” she said, tracing a circle through the map. “I gave a tour to a bunch of trainees this morning. They picked it up right away.”

Ruth Anne looked at the map the way a cat watches TV. Amy could tell that she had no clue what she was seeing.

“See where it says YOU ARE HERE?” Amy asked.

“Mm-hm,” Ruth Anne said, unconvincingly.

“That’s where we are. There’s a map in every department so you can find your way. Like a trail of bread crumbs. As long as you’re paying attention, you can’t get lost.”

Ruth Anne still looked skeptical.

“Just follow me,” Amy said. “We’ll be back at the break area in half an hour.”

They wound their way between bins of pillows, small-person play areas, countertops, info posts, and marketing banners hanging from the ceiling. Big impulse bins obscured corners, and at times Amy couldn’t see the Bright and Shining Path through the maze of furniture. The massive Showroom floor receded to a vanishing point, warping and bending weirdly as it went, and after a while Amy felt as though she was wandering through a vast, trackless wasteland dotted with furniture from some vanished civilization.