Before Ryan could demand an explanation from Vance for the international shipping manifest in his grip, his personal phone vibrated sharply against his thigh. Glancing down at the screen, he saw a high-priority calendar alert pulsing with unyielding insistence—an urgent ping from the regional logistics director summoning him back to the fifth-floor open-plan office immediately. Even as his mind struggled to reconcile a Saturday evening in his residential Rhodes lobby with a corporate summons, the polished marble pillars around him began to blur, the damp river draft instantly replaced by the familiar, humming roar of fluorescent lights and clacking keyboards.
In a disorienting flash of architectural sleight-of-hand, Ryan found himself standing beside his old desk in the Barangaroo corporate pod, the heavy-stock customs manifest still clutched in his trembling fingers. The open-plan floor was unusually crowded for a weekend night, filled with shadowy colleagues tapping away at dual-monitor arrays and murmuring into headset mics. Before he could process the impossible shift in location, his workstation monitor flickered to life, flashing a bright red notification box that demanded an immediate written justification for the phantom freight forwarding entries before the evening audit lock-out.