I lost a few hours after that. I may have fallen asleep in my chair, or passed out from hunger, or simply zoned out. But when I came to, it was after eight, and the top of Marketplace Tower was shrouded with fog.

I would miss the last train out if I didn’t leave soon, though I had no idea where to go.

I reached into the desk drawer for my purse. Beneath it were the air charter contracts I’d squirreled away weeks ago. I couldn’t remember what had bothered me about them, but there was something, and I took them out now and read them through again. They were all signed on behalf of CDMI by Lucy Carter-Jones, director of human resources, and the passenger manifests listed a total of eighteen hundred names on six flights. I recognized some of the names, many of them, from the database of employee names I’d created in The Lab.

One of the chartered flights carried the underage workers I’d flagged earlier, and that discovery prompted me to scan through all the names on the manifests. The passengers were divided by age and gender. Two flights carried men only. Two carried women over forty. The last two carried the younger women and children. That struck me as strange. I wondered if it was some religious thing.

I looked back at my charts showing the inflated asset sales, then back at the flight manifests. The inflated numbers and the passenger names scrolled through my mind in intersecting loops, then the loops lined up into parallel reels and they started to spin like the symbols displayed in a slot machine until one by one they clicked to a stop and lined up to spell it out.

My breath caught in my chest like a fist squeezing. The asset sales weren’t inflated to conceal drug revenues. It was never about drugs. It was worse than drugs. It was eighteen hundred times worse.

I sat frozen with horror. I couldn’t say how long. Those words rang inside my head again. Worker bees. Wage slaves. Fungible. Disposable. We were all the same.

I had the proof, and slowly I pulled myself together enough to put it into a chronology that told the whole story. I labeled the contracts with Post-it notes numbered one through six. I labeled the table of sales figures as number seven. Then I slid the documents into my battered briefcase and grabbed my coat.

A hush swelled through the penthouse corridors as I made my way to the elevator, broken only by the abiding hum of the building’s mechanicals. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know where I could go, but my feet kept moving. It was like I was sleepwalking or in a dream. A nightmare.

I arrived at the elevator bank. Someone else was waiting there, and as I came up beside her, I saw that it was Lucy Carter-Jones, director of human resources. Director of human trafficking.

I stared at her. “I know what you did,” I said.