I worked another puzzle. I read another news website. I went for a stroll around the perimeter of the thirtieth floor, then kicked off my shoes and turned it into a run. I ran lap after dizzying lap, but it was no use. I couldn’t drown out the words in my head.

Work. Work would occupy me more than any of these attempted distractions. I unlocked my desk drawer and took out my notes on the PsT asset sales. I started to plug the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, but I realized that anyone in the company could access it through the server, so I deleted all of it and wrote it out on a legal pad. In the first column, I put a shorthand description of the asset sold; in the second column, I recorded the actual price received; and in the third column, I wrote the falsified price that was on the documents in The Lab.

I filled pages after pages with the data, and when I was done, I totaled up the difference between the actual and the recorded prices. The delta was over $20 million. Twenty million dollars’ worth of drug money masquerading as asset realization. Twenty million dollars’ worth of drugs going into addicts’ bodies and destroying their lives.

And here I was, working for the people responsible for such devastation. And grateful for the chance. David was right: I was pathetic.

I went online again and logged on to lawjobs.com. It was a site I used to visit twice a day, sometimes all day, continuously refreshing the page in hopes that something new would be posted and that if I were the first to see it, I might somehow ensure that the job was mine. I’d hoped those days were behind me forever, but here I was again, desperately scanning the job postings for something, anything, that would get me out of here.

It was late in the day when I spotted my ideal job. I was weak with hunger by then and bleary-eyed from a day of staring at the computer screen, so at first I thought I might have hallucinated it. I couldn’t be seeing right. I blinked hard to clear my vision, but it was still there when I looked again. My ideal job. I was perfect for it. I knew that because it was the job I currently held. The posting was identical to the one I applied for last fall.

CDMI had reposted my job. Ingram Barrett was replacing me.

I was a piece of single-use plastic, to be disposed of after the single use was over. Barrett couldn’t risk having me around after my project was done. Even if I never figured out the drug connection, I might let something slip inadvertently. Better just to let me go and count on the nondisclosure agreement to keep me silent. So he’d told Lucy Carter-Jones to find a replacement, and she’d posted the job.

Everything David said was true. I was nothing. Less than nothing. A worker bee. A wage slave. Fungible. Disposable. Human capital, to be exploited. Human resources, to be mined like ore until the vein was exhausted.