In the restroom. In the hallway. Once, in the elevator.

Two people talking up ahead, me walking behind them, listening.

They'd glance back and spot me, freeze for a second, then go quiet.

I wasn't hurt, and I wasn't angry.

I'd already thought all the same things myself.

A fresh college graduate, used as someone else's workhorse, and when the dust settled she didn't even get table scraps.

That kind of story was a joke no matter where you told it.

If I'd been the bystander, I probably would've laughed too.

But let them laugh.

Sooner or later, some of those people wouldn't find it so funny.

I started studying the Finance Department's workflow in earnest.

The company's reimbursement process was painfully slow. From the moment an expense form was filled out to the moment the money actually hit someone's account, it averaged two weeks.

In between, a claim had to pass through the department supervisor, the finance audit, the finance director, and the general manager's signature.

Layer after layer. Any link in the chain could stall.

I spent a week compiling every reimbursement record from the past year into one dataset.

Sixty percent of all delays were stuck at the same bottleneck.

Invoice auditing.

Invoice auditing was entirely manual, one receipt at a time. The volume was massive and mistakes were easy to make.

Whenever a non-compliant invoice turned up, it got kicked back for resubmission, and just that round trip ate several days.

I thought: could a program handle this automatically?

Once the idea took hold, I started working on it after hours.

The company's accounting system was an older build that didn't support API integration, but it could export spreadsheets.

I studied the file format inside and out, then wrote a Python script that could automatically read each invoice number and tax code from the spreadsheet, run them against the tax bureau's public verification endpoint, and write the results back into the sheet.

The concept wasn't groundbreaking. Plenty of off-the-shelf accounting software could do the same thing. The company just hadn't purchased any.

So I built one myself. Free of charge.

Three days of coding and the core functionality was running.

I spent a few more days debugging, pushing the recognition rate from eighty percent to over ninety-five.

The remaining five percent were mostly invoices that had been photographed out of focus or partially blocked. Those still needed a human eye.

The program was ready, but I didn't rush to show it off.

Because I already knew.

In a new environment, what you actually did didn't matter. What mattered was what other people believed you did.

I kept going to work as usual, doing my tasks as usual, greeting my coworkers as usual.

Then one day, Marilyn came back lugging a stack of invoices, sweat beading at her temples.

"Overtime again. If I don't get through all of these by the end of the week, the monthly report won't close."

I looked at the stack in her arms. Two hundred receipts at least.

"Marilyn, let me help."

She glanced at me. "You've got your own work. I'll manage."

"I already finished everything on my end. Might as well make myself useful."

I took the invoices from her, sat down at my computer, and pulled up the program.

Marilyn didn't notice what I was doing. She'd already hunched over her own desk, cross-checking receipts by hand.

About fifteen minutes later, she looked up. "Susannah, you haven't gone through a single one yet?"

"Already done."

"What?"

"Two hundred and thirteen invoices. Six flagged with issues. I've marked every one."

Marilyn froze. She got up and walked over to my screen.

An Excel spreadsheet filled the display, every invoice's information laid out row by row, each status column reading either "Valid" or "Anomaly."

The six flagged entries had specific reasons noted in the remarks column.

Invoice number nonexistent. Issue date mismatch. Taxpayer ID incorrect.

Marilyn stared at the screen for a good ten seconds, then turned to me. "How did you do that?"

"I wrote a little program. It cross-checks everything automatically."

I didn't say anything else, just pulled out the invoices and went through them one by one.

The six that the program had flagged as anomalies all turned out to have real problems.

After that day, Marilyn's attitude toward me changed.

Not warmer, exactly. She just started talking to me like she meant it.

Before, there had always been something in her tone, a kind of unspoken "you and I aren't on the same level."

That was gone now.

A week later, when month-end reports were due, I used my program to cut her data-processing time from half a day down to thirty minutes.

Marilyn didn't say a word about it, but that afternoon, when she went to the break room for water, she brought a cup back for me.

That afternoon, I went up to the fifteenth floor to deliver some documents.

On my way back, I waited for the elevator. The doors opened, and two people were already inside.

Manager Lambert and Finn.

Finn saw me and stiffened, his gaze sliding awkwardly to the side.

Paul, on the other hand, looked perfectly at ease. He even smiled. "Susannah! Long time no see. How's life in Finance treating you?"

I stepped in and pressed five.

"Fine."

"Good to hear." His tone was breezy. "That programming thing you do, though, they can't have much use for it over in Finance, right?"

"You should swing by Engineering when you've got a minute. We always have little issues popping up. You could lend a hand."

"You know what they say. The capable ones always end up doing more."

The elevator was quiet. Nothing but the low hum of the machinery.

I watched the floor number drop from fifteen to fourteen. "Manager Lambert, I'm in Finance now. I have nothing to do with Engineering."

"Same way I didn't get a single cent of that two million."

The elevator went silent.

Finn lowered his head.

Paul's smile didn't change, but his eyes did.

He stared at me for two full seconds, mouth still curved upward, but his voice had gone cold. "Susannah. What's that supposed to mean?"

"Exactly what it sounds like," I said. "I'm Finance Department personnel. Engineering's business has nothing to do with me."

"You—"

The floor number hit eight.

Paul's expression curdled slowly.

The smile peeled away like paper, and what was underneath wasn't pretty.

"Susannah Simmons, I'm a department manager, and I'm talking to you nicely. Don't push your luck."

I didn't respond.

"Fresh out of college, know a little bit of coding, and suddenly you think you're hot stuff?"

His voice was low, but every word had an edge.

"Let me tell you something. In this company, what are you?"

"You're nothing."

"I've been here fifteen years. Fifteen. And some kid who's barely out of school thinks she can give me attitude?"

"Who gave you the nerve?"

The floor number hit five.

Finn reached over and tugged Paul's sleeve. "Manager Lambert, let it go."

Paul shook him off and kept his eyes locked on me.

"Hmph. You have no idea who you're dealing with."

"Just wait. Sooner or later, you'll regret this."

The doors opened.

I didn't look at him. I walked out.

I'd barely taken two steps when his phone rang behind me.

He picked up, still seething. "Yeah, who is it?"

Then his tone changed completely.

"What did you say? Say that again."

"The client says the system has a major failure? The entire control logic is scrambled, the production line's been down for an hour, and losses are already past a million dollars?"

Paul's voice was shaking.

Finn froze. "How? Didn't everything pass inspection?"

"They said the system started acting up yesterday, and this morning all the data went haywire. The whole production line is shut down."

"On top of that, the client already complained to the CEO!"

I pushed the door open and walked into the Finance Department.

Behind me came the sound of Manager Lambert's voice, shrill with panic: "Get every single engineer back here, now! Move!"

I didn't look back. I smiled.

I'd written the core algorithm for that system.

Nobody knew where the problem was better than I did.

And nobody could fix it.

Except me.