The toy company's meeting room was easy to find. It was just behind the second large open-plan office, a standard rectangular room.
Mai Mingle peered through the glass door and realized she had come to the right place.
The conference table was strewn with countless faintly yellowed slips of paper and documents. Several large binders lay open. A whiteboard bore the remnants of handwriting, diagrams, and several sets of "???" scrawled in bright red marker. On the opposite wall of the meeting room was a dense collage of employee headshots.
There were four rows of photos, with five in each row. They were like headshots used for acting auditions, each about the size of an A4 sheet of paper.
At least a dozen of the photos had large red X's drawn over the faces.
As Mai Mingle quietly pushed the door open, she instinctively held her breath—as if not breathing could help her avoid the misfortune the room seemed to promise.
