The meeting room on the forty-second floor of Rebuild Tech felt less like a corporate boardroom and more like a military command center.
The massive glass box overlooked the sprawling, grey concrete grid of Midtown Manhattan.
Inside, the heavy black marble table was immaculate, stripped of any unnecessary clutter.
The eighty-five-inch interactive monitor on the far wall pulsed with live, cascading streams of financial data, market projections, and internal beta metrics.
Ryan sat at the head of the table.
To his right sat Sophie, her iPad resting on the marble, her posture radiating a fierce, tightly coiled energy.
She had spent the last forty-eight hours executing Ryan's aggressive scaling demands, flooding the forty-first floor with a mercenary army of poached engineers.
She knew the pivot that was coming.
To Ryan's left sat Liam, blinking rapidly behind his glasses, caffeinated and heavily out of his depth, but ready.
