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墨書 Inktalez
The smell of ink from the printer mixed with the sour scent of sweat filled the air as Wang Mingyuan's fingers tapped out a sluggish rhythm on the coffee-stained meeting minutes. The blue light from the LCD screen cast two blurred shadows on his glasses. "The marketing department only found out about Wan Sheng's withdrawal this morning?"
The conference room, packed with twelve people, fell silent. A flurry of paper scraps fluttered down from the central air conditioning vent. Zhang Zhiqiang suddenly chuckled, the bottom of his mug scraping against the table like sandpaper. "Brother Wang, I heard you took Manager Liu and Wan Sheng to Macau last month for an inspection?" He wiped his shiny forehead, "You didn’t end up inspecting them on a cruise ship, did you?"
Sweat beads trickled down my throat, sliding beneath my shirt collar. The projector hummed as it displayed a sharply declining K-line chart; the assistant to the Chief Financial Officer bumped his knee against the table, sending data reports scattering like startled pigeons.
"Twelve hours," Wang Mingyuan suddenly loosened his tie, jabbing the whiteboard marker into the cover of the quarterly report PPT. "If we can't come up with a solution by eight tonight, the whole team is going to the rooftop to smoke and enjoy the night view."
Lin Xueyao's freshly manicured nails sparkled under the table as I counted the vibrations of her WeChat notifications—thirteen times before Zhang Zhiqiang flipped open his gold-plated lighter. "If you ask me, just mortgage that piece of land in the south of the city..."
"That's a trick leftover from ten years ago when real estate speculators were at it." I blurted out, my fingertips still smeared with printer toner, creating spiderweb-like cracks on the whiteboard marker. Wang Mingyuan's neck veins suddenly bulged as if someone had injected liquid nitrogen into his spine.
When the sixth employee volunteered to leave after the meeting, I noticed the third yellowing leaf of the pothos plant in the corner. The burnt smell of instant coffee wafted in from the break room as Wang Mingyuan's motion to pull down the blinds startled a flock of sparrows outside.
"Here’s the financial data you requested." I slid a USB drive across the table; its metallic casing made a soft clink as it landed on the mahogany surface.
He gripped the USB drive tightly, his knuckles turning white. "Did the board send you?" The nib of his fountain pen sliced through the air toward my throat. "Last week's accident on Jianxin Road—didn't the dashcam capture Secretary Li's car?"
The fluorescent lights above crackled softly. I took off my glasses to clean them, and suddenly, sunlight broke through the clouds, casting a barred shadow behind him. "Does Manager Wang like crab soup dumplings?" I pulled out my phone to check my order history. "Delivery from Nanxiang Steamed Bun Shop will arrive at your home in forty minutes."
His Adam's apple bobbed heavily like a silent cannon. As I scrolled through a cash flow simulation on my screen, I caught a glimpse of Zhang Zhiqiang’s bulky silhouette pressed against the blinds outside.
"You dare propose a plan with a risk rate of 67.38%?" The nib of his pen pressed against my thumb resting on the touchpad. "Have you ever played Monopoly? This chart looks like a route rolled by loan shark dice."
The rain outside came crashing down at that moment. I listened to the rhythmic drumming of raindrops against the glass as my fingers danced across the keyboard, tapping out the tempo of "Yangguan San Die": "So we need a quadruple encrypted firewall." The blue light from the monitor reflected the smile behind my glasses, "And we need to trace the email that proves Supervisor Zhang tipped off Wan Sheng."
Wang Mingyuan suddenly tore open his shirt collar, revealing a scar from a knife wound that had healed over the years, flickering in the shadows beneath his Adam's apple. He grabbed the landline microphone and slammed it down hard, the metallic clash startling the footsteps in the corridor into a hurried retreat.
"The intern shouldn't be on the twenty-sixth floor." The access card he tossed sliced through my fingertips. "By seven tomorrow morning, I want to see the revised proposal on the chairman's desk."
As the elevator descended, the sensation of weightlessness was particularly pronounced. I pressed the button for the B2 parking lot, and my phone screen lit up with a new notification from an anonymous email. In the surveillance footage, Zhang Zhiqiang was burning paper documents, with ashes drifting toward a vent just right to capture the safe's password.
The windshield wipers screeched against the glass. In the rearview mirror, Secretary Li's black Phaeton blinked its turn signal, heading toward Suburban Cemetery.
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