By nine thirty p.m., the glittering headquarters of Westbridge Innovations had thinned to a skeleton crew of masochists and temps.
I was both.
My temp badge—lime green, like a traffic cone for humans—scratched against my collarbone every time I leaned over my keyboard. I was pretty sure that was intentional. Nothing subtle about being temporary here.
“Ella, you’re a lifesaver,” my supervisor, Kara, had said four hours ago, dropping a stack of reports with an apologetic smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Just these, okay? Then you can go.”
“Sure,” I’d answered, because I always did.
The analytics floor hummed with air conditioning and the faint, metallic scent of stale coffee. The open-plan desk maze looked like an abandoned battlefield: monitors casting washed-out light, chairs askew, the occasional half-eaten protein bar wrapper as fallen soldier. Most of the analysts had gone home, leaving only a few silhouettes lit against the glass walls of the conference rooms.
I rotated my shoulders, trying to work out the knot between my shoulder blades. My screen glared back at me, Westbridge’s intranet spinning the words ACCESS DENIED for the third time as I tried to upload Kara’s finalized decks to the main server.
“Of course,” I muttered. “Of course you don’t want to cooperate, you glorified filing cabinet.”
The system beeped insistently. Error code. Something about a corrupted link.
I chewed the inside of my cheek. Technically, my job was data entry, calendar wrangling, and printing things other people didn’t want to deal with. But the file that kept spitting out errors wasn’t some marketing flyer. It was a massive analytics workbook tied to the Volterra proposal—a multi-tab beast I recognized from office gossip alone.
Volterra. The deal the entire floor had been losing sleep over.
My cursor hovered. I should just email IT and go home like a sensible temp who knew her place.
But the model’s name flashed across my monitor: VOLTERRA_MASTER_MIRA_3.8.
Mira, as in Mira Stanton. The Mira Stanton—lead analyst, minor office deity, and the woman whose heels everyone seemed slightly afraid of.
My heart did a complicated thing in my chest. Curiosity, anxiety, and a pinch of reckless annoyance.
“Just a peek,” I whispered. “Then you can say you tried.”
I clicked.
The spreadsheet opened in a sprawl of rows and formulas that would have looked like gibberish to most of the admin pool. It didn’t look like gibberish to me.
I shouldn’t have understood it. By all reasonable accounts, a three-week temp who still lived with her mother in a half-furnished apartment should not be able to scan a complex predictive model and see patterns. But there it was—cells lighting up in my brain, a second language I’d secretly been teaching myself after midnight for the last two years.
My pulse picked up. I zoomed into the revenue projection tab.
Something was off.
Cell D42 linked to a sheet that didn’t make any logical sense. The growth assumptions jumped without explanation, spiking in quarter three like someone had leaned on the zero key too long.
“That… can’t be right,” I breathed.
It was probably just a version error. Or a placeholder. Or one of the thousand things that were absolutely none of my business.
I should close the file.
Instead, I leaned closer.
The desk lamp cast a circle of warm light over my hands. Outside, the city smudged into a map of gold and red across the windows, rain streaking the glass. The building’s ninety-second floor hummed faintly under my chair, an expensive ship cutting through stormy seas.
