Gemotions

The coffee tasted like ash in Sarah’s mouth. The news had spread like a toxic leak, polluting the already stale air of the office. She'd walked to her desk feeling a growing tension in her shoulders. Her gaze moved slowly around the room, taking in the mundane details that now seemed infused with a sinister undercurrent. She noticed the new IT guy.

He was a stranger, hired just last week. He kept his head down, but his movements were precise, deliberate. He was always by the servers. She kept finding excuses to walk past his desk, her senses heightened.

She went home that night and spent hours scouring the internet for information, looking for patterns, for anomalies. She felt a burning need to understand what was going on, to anticipate the inevitable fallout. She imagined the job market closing in on her, her career ending.