“Actually, I am,” I said, hoisting a shot glass in his direction: “Prosit!”

“Up yours.” He took a sensible sip. “No, seriously, they’ve got you on the hook, too, haven’t they? That’s why you came in to work late?”

Actually they didn’t. The ten-percenter thing only really applied to staff with actual postgraduate degrees. I’d never finished my PhD, much less got to strut my stuff in a silly robe, but I’d jumped on the bandwagon with a carefully muted shriek of glee. I had my own entirely selfish reasons. Andy might have selected his project because he was suffering from that peculiar version of impostor syndrome to which researcher-turned-admin bodies are prone, but for my part I’d been bitten by a bug, and I needed a plausible excuse to spend 10 percent of my working hours on a scheme the suggestions box committee probably only authorized because they hadn’t understood the full implications. (I had. And it was fascinating. I wish I knew who’d had the idea first, so I could shake their hand . . .)

Last year, a series of unfortunate events in Colorado Springs coincided with me being promoted onto the management fast track—and earlier this year a series of even more unfortunate events derailed me from said track, dumped me on a jet-propelled skateboard, and shoved me onto the career progression equivalent of a crazy golf course played with zombies for putting irons and live hand grenades for balls. Since then I’ve been subject to matrix management by bosses in different departments with diametrically opposed priorities who still think I work under them, while trying to establish just what is expected of me by much more senior people who think I work for them. It’s extremely fatiguing, not least because the furrow I’m ploughing is so lonely that nobody’s actually written a skills development manual for it: the Laundry is about procedures and teamwork and protocol, not super-spies and necromancers.

“I’m on the hook to the extent that I want to be,” I confessed. “Lockhart insisted, actually. Told me I’d never get anywhere unless I ‘set a course and stuck to it,’ to use his words. And Angleton just laughed, then told me to fuck off and play with myself.”

“Angleton said—” Andy’s eyebrow twitched again.