1 The day the city issued the Code Red flood warning, our boss tagged everyone in the company group chat. "Attention all staff. Do not go home after your shift tonight, just in case you can't make it in tomorrow. The company will charge a $100 overnight accommodation fee per person. It will be deducted from your next paycheck!" The office erupted into a chorus of muttered complaints, but no one dared to openly defy her. As a result, at two in the morning, the river levee breached. Violent, muddy floodwaters smashed through the ground-floor office windows. Over a hundred people drowned before they even had the chance to wake up. When I opened my eyes again, I was sitting right back at my desk, staring at the exact moment the boss sent that message. My desk neighbor sighed heavily and asked me how I planned to survive sleeping on the floor tonight. I didn't even hesitate. "I'm quitting." At 3:14 PM, the group chat pinged. Valerie, our boss: "Attention all staff. Do not go home after your shift tonight, just in case you can't make it in tomorrow. The company will charge a $100 overnight accommodation fee per person. It will be deducted from your next paycheck!" I stared at the screen. My fingers moved faster than my brain. "I quit. I'm not staying tonight." Send. The chat went dead silent for three full minutes. Then Valerie's reply popped up. "Luke's overnight fee just went up to $200. Anyone else want to quit? Speak up now so I can process you all at once." Three seconds later, the first bootlicker replied. "Received. I will follow the company's arrangements." Then came the second, the third, and the fourth. Someone specifically tagged me in the chat. "Luke, can you not drag the rest of us down with your drama?" In my previous life, this exact same group of people lined up like good little sheep to drown in a vortex of filthy brown water. At 2:00 AM, the levee broke. The steel roller doors of the ground-floor office warped and buckled under the pressure. The water poured in faster than human lungs could scream. Over a hundred people. Not a single one made it out. I stared at the endless stream of "Received" scrolling down my monitor and slammed my phone face-down on the desk. The HR Manager's chat icon flashed. She didn't type a single word. She just forwarded three scanned documents in rapid succession. The first: A Non-Compete Agreement. Banned from working in this industry for two years after resignation. Penalty for breach: $30,000. I was making a miserable entry-level salary. I would have to starve for three and a half years to pay that off. The second: A Training Service Agreement. The "pre-employment onboarding" the company provided was valued at $5,000. Anyone leaving before three years of service had to repay it in full. The third: My original university diploma and degree certificates. On my first day, Admin told me they needed to "centrally manage" our documents. My original, irreplaceable degrees were currently locked in a filing cabinet down the hall. I was naive back then. I didn't know it was completely illegal for an employer to hold original identification and degree certificates hostage. In my last life, I told myself to just swallow my pride and endure it. And my reward was dying in the dark, suffocating in freezing floodwater. A voice memo from HR popped up. "Luke, throwing a tantrum today might feel good. But how are you going to feed yourself tomorrow? Going to apply to jobs with your high school diploma?" I stood up. The legs of my office chair scraped violently against the floor, letting out an ear-piercing screech. The entire open-plan office fell dead silent for a split second. Over a hundred pairs of eyes flicked up to look at me, then immediately dropped back down to their screens. I walked straight to the Admin desk and held out my hand. "My documents. My diplomas. Give them to me right now." Derek, the operations admin, didn't even look up. His fingers kept clacking away on a spreadsheet. "Centralized document management is company policy. Employees are not permitted to withdraw them without authorization." "Those are my personal documents." At the next desk over, Jessica leaned back in her chair. "Give it a rest, Luke. Stop being a drama queen. Two hundred bucks is still money. With your financial background, you really think you can afford to be picky?" Sitting across from her, Marcus chuckled. He laughed, but he wouldn't make eye contact with me. "He probably thinks he can go home and become a famous TikTok influencer. That's the trendy thing to do these days, right?" Jessica giggled, echoing his mockery. Derek finally stopped typing. He stood up and snapped a file folder shut. "Luke, if you really want to leave, you can. Just settle your $5,000 training fee and your non-compete penalty first. Finance." He turned his head toward the accounting desks. Without looking up, Greg from Finance called out a number. "Thirty-five thousand dollars total." Marcus snorted. "Thirty-five grand. If his family had that kind of cash, he wouldn't be working a desk job here." He side-eyed me and took a slow sip from his coffee mug. I stood in front of Derek's desk. Derek sat back down and resumed typing his expense reports. He left the back of his head facing me. The cowlick at the crown of his hair was perfectly, meticulously round. The clack-clack-clack of his mechanical keyboard never stopped. No one else spoke to me. A new message popped up in the main group chat from Valerie. "Since everyone is on board, we will lock down for the night. Admin, get a headcount. Not a single person is allowed to be missing." Below her message, another wave of "Received" flooded the screen. My phone buzzed in my hand. HR sent another private message. "Luke, it's not too late to withdraw your resignation. Valerie said the $200 fee is a special favor to you to teach you a lesson. Don't be ungrateful." I didn't reply. I grabbed my backpack and walked straight toward the main entrance. In my previous life, the floodwaters swept my bag away. By the time my parents arrived to identify me, my body was bloated beyond recognition. I swiped my badge at the door. The access panel lit up with stark red letters. PERMISSION DENIED. ACCOUNT FROZEN. Footsteps approached from behind. Derek's voice was ice-cold. "The flood emergency protocol has been initiated. All entrances and exits are locked down. Access privileges are now entirely under Admin control." I turned to look at him. "This is false imprisonment." I stared dead at the glowing red padlock icon on the screen. Derek just sneered, turned around, and walked away. I walked back to my desk. My phone screen was lit up. Another message from HR was waiting for me. "Your employment file is still registered under the company's collective account. If you insist on forcing your way out today, I will write 'Terminated for Severe Disciplinary Violations' on your official separation papers." "That means this record will follow you forever. It means you will fail every background check for your next job. It means you can forget about applying for grad school or civil service." "Of course, if you cooperate and tough it out tonight, I can write it up as a standard resignation. Your choice." I gripped my phone tightly, the screen casting a pale light on my face. At the desk next to mine, Jessica was shoving potato chips into her mouth, chewing loudly with aggressive crunches. At 5:30 PM. A sudden message popped up in the main company chat. "Hey, I heard there's a massive discrepancy with the client payments Luke handled last week?" The chat was quiet for barely three seconds. Then someone else replied. "No wonder he's in such a rush to quit and run. He's terrified of an audit." Derek chimed in as the Admin. "Colleagues, please do not spread unverified information. The company will handle this according to protocol." He followed it up with an emoji. A sarcastic clown face. Underneath it read: IYKYK. The sheep immediately followed the formation. People started spamming the clown emoji. Others posted "Yikes" and a string of snickering faces. Jessica turned her head and gave me a filthy look. My entire body ran cold. I sat in my chair, utterly paralyzed by the sheer audacity of it. A few minutes later, Greg and Derek walked over to my desk. Greg was holding a stack of printed papers. He walked right up to me and violently slapped the stack directly against my face. He looked down at me with pure disdain. "Luke, the funds from the accounts you managed have completely vanished." I looked up. Greg let out a dark chuckle. "Four thousand dollars. Let's hear your excuse." The surrounding office went completely silent. I reached up, caught one of the papers fluttering down from my face, and slammed it onto the desk. "Every single transaction was ordered directly by the boss. Every single one has an approval record in the system." The corner of Greg's mouth twitched upward. "Approval records? I checked the system. There's nothing there. You think hiding behind Valerie's name means we won't investigate?" My fingernails dug violently into my palms. The two men stood over me, tossing insults one after another. "Luke, if you hadn't thrown this massive tantrum about quitting, we wouldn't have even looked deep enough to find all this dirt." He stared at me, his eyes burning with undisguised malice. "Exactly. Auditing these books is exhausting, you know?" "The weather is absolute garbage, and you're making us work overtime. You're lucky we aren't billing you for our lost hours!" Sitting there, looking at these two clowns, I almost laughed out loud. "You guys are putting on a hell of a show. Who's the audience? Just spit it out. What do you want?" Derek stepped forward, pulled a single sheet of paper from a folder, and slammed it down in front of me. He used more force than I had. The paper bounced slightly off the wood. Statement of Voluntary Confession and Agreement to Compensate by Employee Luke. "Sign it. The money will be deducted from your paychecks in installments." "Then this whole thing goes away. You put your head down, do your job, and stop bringing up all this garbage about resigning." I let out a dry laugh. "And if I don't sign?" "If you don't sign, we call the cops the second this storm passes." He glanced down at the scattered papers on the floor. "Four grand is a felony. It's enough to lock you up for a good while. And I don't think I need to educate you on what a prison record does to a resume, do I?" I pushed my chair back and stood up. "You lock the main doors. You trap over a hundred people inside. You freeze the access systems. There are no fire exits. There's a Code Red weather warning outside, and we can't leave. The legal term for that is false imprisonment." "When the cops get here, what do you think they're going to investigate first? A fabricated four grand, or the guys who locked the exits?" Derek's pupils contracted sharply. But instead of getting angry, he laughed. He raised his hand and violently shoved me backward. Caught off guard, I stumbled back. My spine slammed hard into the edge of the cubicle partition with a sickening thud. Over a hundred people craned their necks to watch. Derek rolled his wrist, looking down at me like I was a bug. "We try to do this the nice way and you don't listen. Guess you want to do this the hard way." I glared at him. I was just about to swing back when a voice cut through the tension. "What is all this yelling? Are you all trying to get fired?" I looked over. It was Valerie. She walked over with a sweet, sickening smile on her face. She stared at the red mark developing on my arm and chuckled softly. "Luke, why do you always have to be so extreme?" She reached out to pat my shoulder, but I dodged her hand. "Locking the doors is a flood safety protocol. It's not targeting you. Everyone is staying here tonight for centralized management, so we can keep our project timelines aligned. Look around." She turned, opened her arms wide, and beamed at the hundred-plus employees in the room. "Does anyone here have an objection to the company's arrangements for tonight? Speak up now." It was like someone hit the mute button on the entire room. Marcus ducked his head. Jessica pushed her bag of chips to the far corner of her desk. The people who had been craning their necks just seconds ago snapped back into their seats, their eyes glued firmly to their monitors. Valerie turned back to me. Her smile hadn't shifted a millimeter. "You see? Over a hundred people, and you're the only one with a problem. Is it possible that the problem is actually you?" Marcus immediately threw a rock from the sidelines. "Luke, I've tolerated you for a long time. You don't come to team-building events, you skip company dinners. You think you're so special." "Marcus, who covered your shift last week?" My throat felt tight with disgust. Marcus's eyes darted away. "Did I ask you to? I didn't beg you." Jessica chimed in with a sneer. "He literally tracks his overtime pay down to the exact decimal point with Finance. Someone that petty? No wonder he embezzled four grand." Last month, her code completely crashed. I stayed at the office until 3:00 AM fixing it for her. "Jessica, who fixed your fatal bugs?" Her face froze for a second. "Who asked you to fix them? You volunteered." Valerie crossed her arms and watched me suffer. I took another step back. "I am leaving today. I'll pay the money. Give me the account number. I will transfer the four grand right now. Just let me go." Valerie laughed. She took a step closer. She wasn't going to let me off the hook. "Luke, there's a Code Red storm outside. How could I possibly let you leave with a clear conscience? This company is a collective. We are as warm and loving as a family." I backed up until my lower back hit the edge of my desk. She reached out and pressed her hand over my phone, which was sitting on the desk. No, she didn't press the phone. She pressed her hand directly over mine. Her palm covered the back of my hand. Her thumb slowly, suggestively stroked my skin. "Look at this, everyone. Luke is highly emotional right now. How could I let him leave alone? If something happens to him on the road, who takes responsibility?" I violently yanked my hand back, wiping the back of it furiously against my pants. I looked around. Marcus was staring into his coffee mug. Jessica was aggressively staring at her screen. Derek was inspecting his fingernails. Over a hundred people. Just minutes ago, their lips were moving a mile a minute dragging my name through the mud. Now, every single one of them was magically blind. "Let go of me!" I raised my arm to push her away, but she grabbed my wrist, her grip so tight my bones ground together. She leaned her face in close. "Luke, be a good boy. Stop throwing a tantrum." Every hair on my body stood straight up. "Get off me! This is sexual harassment!" Valerie let go of my wrist, took a step back, and threw her hands up in mock innocence. "Sexual harassment? Is it a crime to care about my employees? Luke, aren't you being a little too sensitive?" I stood in the middle of the crowd. My arm still stung from the shove. The feeling of her hand on mine felt like sticky slime on my skin. No matter how hard I rubbed it, I couldn't get it off. My stomach churned violently. I wanted to vomit. "I am quitting right now. I will pay whatever penalty you want, but you are going to let me walk out that door right now." I stared directly into Valerie's eyes. "Or I am calling the police." Valerie let out a cold, sharp sneer. "Like hell you're leaving! Let me make this clear, Luke. I pay your salary. That means the time you spend in this building belongs to me. If I say you don't quit, you don't quit. It's just a little rainstorm. You are staying in this office tonight!" I stared at her. A wave of pure nausea and dizziness washed over me simultaneously. In my previous life. I went to the bathroom after working late. Just as I pushed the stall door open, a hand reached out from inside. In my previous life, I screamed, but the torrential rain outside drowned out the sound. No one heard me. I gathered spit in my mouth and spat violently right in her face. Before she could even process what happened, I whipped out my phone and dialed my sister. "Sarah, I need you to come get me right now." A hand reached out from behind me and wrenched the phone out of my grip. Valerie shoved my phone into Derek's chest. She wiped her face, her expression twisting into something demonic. She grabbed my shoulders, pinning me in place. "Luke, do you really think paying me thirty grand ends this? I don't give a damn about thirty grand. What I want is..." Her eyes slowly dragged down my body. The corner of her mouth hooked up into a sickening smirk. I knew exactly what she meant. I leaned back against the desk, my ten fingers gripping the edge of the wood so hard my knuckles turned white. Valerie reached out to grab my arm again. "Come on. Let's go to my private office." Right at that exact second. A deafening crash exploded from the direction of the main entrance. It was the sound of something heavy and reinforced being violently kicked off its hinges. The security access panel let out an ear-piercing screech. Every fluorescent light tube in the entire building flickered violently. I turned my head, completely stunned. My older sister, Sarah, was standing in the doorway. Behind her stood a row of massive, heavily built men. Their faces were dark as thunder.
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