There are five of us on Team D.
Me. Jin Carrera, Senior FP&A, dyed bangs and a black coffee. Drew Castellanos, Senior AE, unlit Marlboro tucked behind one ear. Indie Patel, junior PM, a soft kid with her hair in a French braid. Mateo Reyes, customer success lead, quiet.
Other than me, none of us is what Pellucid considers a core revenue role. Sales has rotated past Drew for the last six months because he doesn't drink with the right men. Indie has been a PM for four months. Logan has never used Jin's name without checking a directory first.
Logan finds us in the breakout room after the assignments are sealed.
"Wren. You came on a little strong tonight."
He stands under the recessed downlight. Pellucid-polo, salt-and-pepper, calibrated.
"Yara's your friend. Humiliating her in front of Marcus — that does not help you."
"Yara swapping my team," I say. "Did that help me?"
His mentor-smile fades a half-watt.
She's off-script. Burn her credibility before she shares the receipts.
He pitches his voice for the room.
"I get it. The pressure is real. But Pellucid grades on outcomes, not who's loudest. Team D is a tough lineup. You especially need to keep your people calm."
Heads turn from the next table.
He's slotting me into the unstable woman PM drawer in front of my own team.
Jin folds her arms and lets her mouth do a small cold thing. "Logan, we haven't run our kickoff yet. You don't need to pre-grade us, do you?"
I look at her.
Cross can keep his act. The vendor schedule he's been signing has been smelling for six months. If Tanaka-Hollis wants to pull the thread I'm in.
Drew leans his chair back on two legs, drawl on. "Yeah, man. What if we win this thing?"
Sales has been begging to ditch this guy for a year. I'd rather burn down with Tanaka-Hollis than let Cross harvest me one more quarter.
Indie says, quietly, "Wren, I'll do whatever you say."
Please don't let me get cut. Mom's dialysis copay is on my card.
Mateo just nods.
I'm slow on the talking. I'm not slow on the work.
Turns out D-team isn't dead weight.
It's just that no one has been playing them.
Task One drops at 7 a.m. the next morning.
In 24 hours, produce a go-to-market plan for Pellucid Edge in an island/resort vertical, and secure three signed letters of intent from real prospects.
A-team has Logan and three closer reps.
C-team has Soren — the principal engineer who wrote the kernel — and Yara, who can sell to anyone if she has eye contact.
D-team has Drew, one AE the senior AEs have been sidelining for half a year.
I'm carrying my tray out of the cafeteria when Yara plants herself in the doorway. Her eyes are pink. Mascara unevenly removed.
"Wren. Last night I was wrong, okay? We've been friends since freshman year. Are you really going to watch them dock my whole team because of me?"
I keep walking. I am two feet past her when she raises her voice.
"Are you still mad about the promotion slot? My dad was in the hospital, I had no choice!"
The cafeteria stops chewing.
I stop walking.
This thing she just brought up. She has not said it out loud in three years. Pellucid had one PM-to-Senior-PM slot in the cycle three years ago, and I deferred my packet so the panel would consider hers instead. The internal narrative on record was Yara's numbers were stronger. I never corrected anyone.
If the room thinks she's petty, no one believes the receipts. That's Yara's voice. Cool, articulated.
I set the tray down on the closest table.
"Yara. Your mom was the one in the hospital. Mount Sinai, private room. The $8,400 co-pay was on me."
Her face changes.
I keep going.
"Two months after you got the title, you posted the Bottega Jodie. The bag was $2,800. You muted me from your finsta the week you posted it. You forgot I'd see. I didn't forget."
The cafeteria has gone quiet enough I can hear the steam table.
Somebody behind me, low: "Are you serious."
I pull up my phone. Three Venmo screenshots, all memo'd mom hospital — pay back when you can. The finsta post of the bag, timestamp visible. The mute-friend list pulled from settings.
"You wanted to do this in public, Yara. Let's do it in public."
She moves at my phone.
A hand comes between us before hers does. Steady. Big knuckles, a thin scar across the second one.
Soren is standing next to me. Voice low.
"Don't touch her."
Touch her again. See what happens to your hand.
Yara is crying harder than she was three minutes ago.
"Soren, why are you helping her. I'm on your team."
He doesn't look at her.
"I'm helping the facts."
Yara melts down in the cafeteria for about ninety more seconds before two ops staff walk her out. Team C gets dinged five points for team disorder. She's grinding her teeth so hard from the doorway I can see it across the room.
I don't have time for her.
D-team is back in our breakout by 8:15. I have the task slide on the whiteboard.
"Island vertical. That means property ops, F&B, security, transportation. We don't fight A-team for traditional logos. We sell to the actual operators on this island."
Drew's eyes light up. "Property manager, F&B contractor, the yacht charter outfit."
I nod.
Jin opens her laptop. "I'll pull the parent entities and the LOI templates."
Indie volunteers to chat up the housekeeping crew and the dock staff for pain points. Mateo collates customer-success data we already have on similar verticals from the mainland.
By 3 p.m. we have a signed pre-LOI in hand from the property manager and verbal interest from F&B.
At 3:14 the projector goes black.
The deck on the shared drive: gone.
The local copies in the breakout-room laptop: empty.
The personal NAS-sync icon on my own laptop shows connection lost.
Drew swears. "Who got in here?"
I look at the door. The little red light on the ceiling camera, the one that should be on whenever the room is occupied, is off.
A Slack ping in the company channel from Logan: Reminder — data discipline is part of the exercise. If Team D can't deliver on time, you can declare a no-submit and surrender the round.
Eleven seconds after that, Yara: Wrenny, want me to share the C-team template? Don't kill yourselves over this.
Beg me. Cry. No deliverable, you're at the bottom.
Indie's eyes are wet. "I saw Yara outside the door. Like ten minutes ago."
Jin, level: "Camera's off. No proof."
I look at the dead projector. Something cold drops into place in my chest, then steadies.
"There's proof."
I pull my phone out and tap into the Voice Memos app. AirPods Pro Live Listen, paired silently, has been recording from the desk since the cafeteria. The transcription pane is already live, names auto-attributed. I scroll up.
A line at 2:47 p.m., flagged speaker Y. Shelton:
wipe it clean. Cross said. don't leave a recovery trail.
Nobody talks.
Drew lifts his hands and starts a slow clap.
"Wren. Have you been hiding the whole time."
I almost smile.
"I used to think I didn't need to."
I look at Jin. At Drew. At the dead projector.
I need them to find out the doormat has teeth.
We don't drop the transcript yet. Jin says it first.
"If you push it now, Yara takes a slap. Cross walks. He's got a brother-in-law buried two filings deep — he can survive Yara saying his last name on tape."
I nod. "So we sit on it."
We start the deck over from a clean Notion. Drew is on phones with the F&B contractor. Indie is rebuilding the customer-pain-points slide from memory plus the cafeteria conversations she logged. Jin is on the cost model.
At 8:07 p.m. there's a knock. Soren is in the doorway. He has a black SSD in one hand.
"Platform runs an auto-snapshot every two hours on all shared workspaces. Internal compliance retains forty-eight hours."
I stare at him.
"How do you have that."
"Platform owns the snapshot service. I'm Platform."
A breath. "Any team can request a restore. It's in the SOC2 process doc."
Want to help. Don't want her to think I'm helping. Found three compliance bases. Will she think I'm hovering.
I take the drive.
"Thanks."
His ears go red.
Drew is suffocating on a laugh and trying to hide it behind a cough.
The door swings open without a knock. Yara.
"Soren, what is wrong with you. You're on C-team."
Soren looks up.
"I didn't share a deck. I shared a snapshot of D-team's own workspace. Any team can file the same request."
"Then why did you only file it for her."
Two seconds where Soren doesn't speak.
Because I love her.
What he says, out loud: "Because she asked first."
I almost lose composure.
Yara is shaking.
"Wren. You really love taking other people's things, don't you?"
I set my phone on the table. I tap the transcript line and let it play through the laptop speaker.
wipe it clean. Cross said. don't leave a recovery trail.
Her voice in the room. Her voice in the doorway, three seconds out of phase with itself.
The color comes off her face in stages.
"So who's taking whose," I say.
We send the transcript to ops. C-team takes another twenty-point deduction. Yara is officially on warning. Logan walks out of it untouched, because the transcript says Cross, not Logan Cross. There are three Crosses in the company directory.
Logan finds me in the corridor between the breakout rooms and the kitchen. The mentor mask is off this time. The version underneath has a tighter mouth.
"Wren. You're a smart girl."
"Thank you."
His eyes are dim.
"Smart girls leave themselves an exit. You think a couple voice clips put me down."
Does she have the books or doesn't she. If she does I need them.
I don't answer.
He steps closer. Drops his voice. "Your folks still run that bakery in the River Arts District. Asheville. The county fire marshal's annual inspection — that's due in October, right? Be a shame if somebody pulled the file."
I look up.
He smiles.
"Don't take that the wrong way. I just like to know my reports' families."
My stomach turns over.
Footsteps in the corridor. Soren has a bottle of water in his hand. He steps between us and hands me the water.
"Marcus is looking for you."
Logan's smile takes on an edge. "Soren. Stay out of this."
Soren's voice is flat. "You're in the way."
Logan walks off slow, like it was his idea.
I'm holding the bottle hard enough my knuckles are white.
Soren looks at me. He doesn't quite touch me.
Want to hold her.
She's keeping it together.
Can't. It'll scare her.
What he says is, "I know a fire-safety compliance consultant. If you want, I'll put you on a call about your parents' bakery before next week."
I look at him.
"Soren. Why are you doing this."
His throat moves.
"Because you did it for me."
I think about it. The only thing I can find is a single pink Starburst.
"Three months ago," he adds. "The umbrella."
I almost laugh. "Soren. That was you helping me."
He looks at me. Patient.
"You said, when you returned the shell. You said I wasn't a weirdo."
The laugh stops.
Turns out a throwaway line can sit in someone for three months and not move.