Taking the steps two at a time, she surfaced next to the café on the Showroom floor. The Showroom was the centerpiece of the Orsk experience—an ocean of furniture awash with room displays staged to look like real homes decorated with Orsk furniture (all available for purchase in the Self-Service Warehouse downstairs). Amy zipped through Children’s, heading for a shortcut between departments, when she noticed someone staring at her and skidded to a halt.

A man was standing in the distance, up near the Magog bunk beds, and even from far away Amy knew he wasn’t a store partner. Orsk employees came in four different colors: floor partners in beige shirts, replenishment partners in orange shirts, operations partners in brown shirts, and trainees in red shirts. The man staring at Amy was dressed in dark blue. He didn’t belong. He might have been a customer who sneaked in early.

But before she could investigate, the man turned and darted into Wardrobes. Amy just shrugged—whoever he was, he wasn’t her problem.

Staying away from Basil until her transfer came through—that was her problem.

She took the shortcut into Storage Solutions, picked her way through several rows of Tawse and Ficcaro storage combinations, and finally emerged in the lowlands of Home Office, a shop populated with nothing but desks. Basil stood waiting next to the information post that Amy called home, with six trainees in red shirts clustered behind him.

“Good morning, Amy,” he said. “I need you to take these trainees on the main aisle walk.”

“I’d love to,” Amy said, smiling so hard her face hurt. “But yesterday Pat asked me to floor-check inventory.”

“I need you to take these trainees on the main aisle walk,” Basil repeated. “Someone else can do the floor check.”

Amy was about to protest further—something about Basil compelled her to argue with every word that came out of his mouth—when her cell phone unleashed a shrill Woody Woodpecker laugh, informing her that she’d received a text message. Basil watched in disbelief as she fumbled the phone out of her pocket.

“Of course,” Basil announced to the trainees, “Amy knows that partners are never permitted to bring their phones onto the Showroom floor.”

“It’s another help message,” she explained, showing him the phone’s screen.

A few weeks earlier, several floor partners had started receiving one-word texts reading help from the same private number. Proliferating like rabbits, the texts came pouring in at all hours, and they were freaking people out. Corporate claimed that IT was powerless to address the issue since it was technically not Orsk related. They advised partners to block the offending number or consult with their service providers. Amy had tried both suggestions, but the occasional help still slipped through.