If Amy squinted, she could dimly see Basil’s tall, gawky silhouette through the front windows, trying to direct the human traffic jam by waving his spaghetti-noodle arms in the air. Getting even this close to him sent a cold bolt of fear through her stomach, but his back was turned. Maybe she had a chance.

“Good thoughts, Matt,” she said.

Seizing her moment, Amy ninjaed her way through the crowd, ducking behind backs, stepping on toes, and slipping into open spaces. She entered the atrium and was immediately enveloped in the soothing embrace of Orsk—where it was always the perfect temperature, where the rooms were always perfectly lit, where the piped-in music was always the perfect volume, where it was always perfectly calm. But this morning the air had an edge to it, the faint scent of something rancid.

“I didn’t think this escalator could run in reverse,” Basil was saying to an operations partner who was pounding on the emergency stop button to no effect. “Is this even mechanically possible?”

Amy didn’t stick around to find out. Her sole objective for the day—and for the next several days—was to avoid Basil at all costs. As long as he didn’t see her, she reasoned, he couldn’t fire her.

The Cuyahoga store had been operational for just eleven months, but it was already an open secret that it was falling short of corporate sales expectations. The failure wasn’t due to a lack of customers. On weekends especially, the Showroom and Market Floor were packed with families, couples, retirees, people with nowhere else to go, college kids and their roommates, new families with their new babies, grim-faced couples buying their first sofas … a legion of potential customers, clutching maps, bags stuffed with lists of model numbers written on sticky notes, with torn-out pages from the Orsk catalog, credit cards burning holes in their pockets, all of them ready to spend.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, sales weren’t hitting projections.

Amy had transferred to Cuyahoga from the Youngstown store fifty miles away. Initially she was okay with the move; she lived halfway between the two locations, and her commute hadn’t changed. But after eleven months in Cuyahoga, she’d had enough. She filed a transfer request to get back to Youngstown, and now the computers at Orsk Regional were chewing over the paperwork. Help was on the way, if only she could last a few more days.