The Drop

On a Friday in November, Kairion Technologies fires four hundred people before lunch.
Jason Cole, a veteran and product manager, gets the call at 6:15 AM. By eight o'clock, his badge is dead and his mother's care facility has six months of funding left. Devonte Washington, a young designer who relocated from LA for a job that just vanished, sits on the hallway floor and forgets where he was going. Priya Mehta, a director of data operations who is thirty-one weeks pregnant, reads the termination email and realizes she built the system that replaced her. Sloane Morrow is not who she says she is. And Tommy Slattery, a building maintenance worker with a bad heart, has been warning people about the elevator for six weeks. Nobody listened.
At 8:16 AM, five strangers step into Car 7 of the express elevator. The doors close. The car stops between floors thirty-four and thirty-five. Three hundred and forty feet above the ground, the cables begin to sing.
What follows is six hours of rising heat, failing systems, and the slow collapse of every wall these five people have built around themselves. Confessions are made. Secrets are exposed. A name is revealed that turns the elevator into a courtroom. And the building - indifferent, mechanical, and running out of patience - tightens its grip one cable at a time.
The failure was not an event. It was a process. And the process started long before the elevator stopped.
A claustrophobic thriller about the systems we build, the people we discard, and what happens when the floor disappears.

Darryl Wayne Townsend Jr. is the author of seventeen books spanning literary fiction, thrillers, novellas, and nonfiction. His work lives in the spaces between people - the things they can't say, the things they won't say, and the things they say to the wrong person. His novels include Still Water, Rare Pull, Taylor, Glass Empire, and Heavy Load. His nonfiction includes The Catalog Mindset and Don't Blow the Bag. He is the founder of Polymath Portfolio Group LLC and hosts the podcast Wait a Minute, Bitch on Spotify. He lives in Seattle. He is not done.