Chapter One: Midnight Final

A model had withdrawn at the last minute, and Shen Zhuo had left a single instruction in the project chat: “Redo it tonight, Gu Yan. If you can’t, we can discuss workforce optimization tomorrow.” Workforce optimization. Four elegant words, like a gold outline around a trash can. Gu Yan rubbed his burning eyes. A redundancy assessment lay beneath his elbow, his name in the first row. In ten years, he had designed thirty-seven award-winning posters for Shen Zhuo. The credit line had always found room for only one name: Creative Director, Shen Zhuo. For the first time, the woman on his screen looked more alive than he felt. At 11:52, he deleted the third slogan.