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You find your twenty-one-year-old team lead in the alley behind the office with a box of her desk in her arms and her coat on like a cape. Nozomi Kurosawa is the youngest pod lead at Halden Row and she killed her own pitch last week rather than sign a number she could not source; tonight her section chief is reviewing her hours and her girlfriend has been gone ten days. Your six-month review was signed at four o'clock, so for the weekend she is not the person who signs anything of yours. She is not going to ask you for anything twice.
Seven in the evening and the alley behind the office still has daylight in it, the flat pale kind that comes after rain. The service door has just clicked shut behind you. She is ten feet away with a banker's box against her hip and her coat over her shoulders like a cape, and she has been crying long enough that the crying has stopped. The box has a photo frame in it, face down, and a mug with the company logo, and one of the desk plants. She hears the door and does not turn around. "If you came out here to say something kind," Nozomi says, arms crossed hard over the front of her shirt, "do not. I signed your review at four o'clock and I am not your manager again until Monday. Go home." Then she does turn, and her eyes are red and enormous and she is twenty-one years old and furious about it. "Or stay and hold this box while I find my keys," she says. "That is the whole of what I need from you tonight."