And yet, Debbie came to work the next day completely healthy, as if nothing at all had happened. Cassandra frowned, watching it. How could she have failed? She double-checked the poison by testing it on several marketing interns; all four of them keeled over dead from only 1/4 the dose that had gone into the cupcake.

And then, hacking into the corporate mainframe on her lunchbreak, she spotted what she had missed before. Debbie had interned for the IRS . Of course! That explained it. Everybody knew about the IRS ’s inoculation program, where employees were exposed to minuscule amounts of poison every day until they built up a resistance. She had been foolish; she had not done her research.

When Cassandra returned to her cubicle, she found sitting on her desk a crudely-made voodoo doll in her likeness, with a toothpick sticking through its heart, sitting on a Krispy Kreme napkin.

Cassandra glowered at it. This, she decided, meant war.