lisa sprints into the laundry room. It is happening: For a second, she’d glimpsed the Pug backing into the loading dock and making such a serpentine production of it that the guard had rushed forward, a troubling thing, even as it had allowed Elisa space enough to take the broom and nudge the security camera upward before scrambling away. Her waist strikes the industrial sink, and she plugs the drain, cranks both hot and cold knobs. She snatches towels from a bin and hurls them under the water. Elisa and Zelda have spent years ridiculing Fleming’s QCCs, but now she’s got to hand it to the man: The practices rutted into her brain keep her on task when she otherwise might collapse in terror.

She scoops the sopping towels from the sink and drops them, heavy as mud, into the closest empty laundry cart. She keeps going, her uniform getting wetter, until the cart is half-filled, then wrenches off the water and clenches the cart handle. She pushes; the cart doesn’t budge. Her marrow turns to ice. She tries again, teeth bared, muscles tight, bearing down on her sneakers. The first inch is the toughest, but after that the cart slugs forward, one rotation, two. Her stopped heart picks up the beat, only to hiccup again: It’s the squeaky cart, the one that yowls like a tomcat, and there is no time left for switching it out.