Gravy Train

Dale Kowalski cleared four Regional Managers, built a town out of a folding table and a clipboard, and thought that meant the hard part was over.

Then a five-day-old delivery order finally resolves - dropoff: Zone Seven, uncleared - and Dale finds out the System has been running something worse than a bad boss the whole time. Zone Seven isn't a warehouse or a call center. It's a subscription trap: two hundred people held in an infinite hold-music loop by a retention specialist who's never once been allowed to process a cancellation, going on eight hundred and forty-seven days.

Freeing them cracks open something bigger. Somewhere above every Regional Manager Dale has ever fought is a Continental Optimization Office - and above that, a Board: the exhausted "winners" of the last Onboarding cycle, trapped running the very system they once escaped, because nobody ever built a door out for the people who make it to the top.

The Continental Divide is the second Gravy Train novel - bigger scale, higher stakes, and the same stubborn philosophy that got Dale this far: you don't beat a broken system by fighting harder. You beat it by refusing to stop asking the one question nobody in charge ever wants to answer honestly.