THE THING ABOUT OSCAR MENENDEZ, IN MHARI’S OPINION, IS that he is intelligent, charming, personable, manipulative, and utterly ruthless. He is not a normal workplace sociopath: he is that much more dangerous phenomenon, a not-quite-neurotypical person who has worked among the regular sociopaths for so long that he can see things from their point of view and manipulate them; a dolphin among sharks. Sociopaths aren’t good at impulse control or deferred gratification. Oscar works out what they want, dangles it in front of them like a shiny bauble in front of a kitten, and ensures that the shortest route from predator to prize takes them right where he wants them to go. Which is why the Bank gave him, if not carte blanche, then at least a clean sheet and a low seven-digit budget with which to establish the Scrum. It has been a pleasure to work with him, and to help steer the Scrum around the worst obstacles in its path. And now she’s going to accompany him to a meeting with their overseers where he is going to try and talk them into giving the Scrum a slightly larger pot to play with.

He’s assigned her the job of covering the exits, lest any of the cattle try to flee.

It has been an interesting month since Alex’s accidental flash of insight and their subsequent week-long scramble to research and define the potentials and pitfalls of their new condition. Mhari has been working eighty-hour weeks, and she’s not alone—not that there’s anyone waiting back home for her since Alan fucked off last year. (Or, if you want to be truthful, since she fired him for being an insufficiently supportive partner.) Oscar is similarly, if not single, then moderately unencumbered: his wife Pippa seems content to play the role of arm-candy on demand, keep their two children out of his hair, and look after the house in return for her annual Mercedes SLC and the Royal Opera House season ticket.

As the managerial side of the Scrum, they’ve barely been out of each other’s presence for the past few weeks as they organized the office move, pushed their people through the planning and early execution stages of what they have come to call the Big Pivot, arranged the tiresome but entirely necessary in-house dental visits for the team, and attended to all the other necessary minutiae of the operation.

And now it’s time for Oscar’s big pitch.