Last Riddle of the Night

The neon sign buzzed like a dying insect, casting salmon light across Maya's exhausted face. Three A.M. again, and she felt like a **zombie**—not the movie kind with outstretched arms and groans, but the office kind: dead inside, still somehow functioning, fueled by caffeine and a mortgage that wouldn't pay itself.

"What's the answer, Maya?"

The voice came from the corner office. Richard, her boss, sat behind his desk like a corporate **sphinx**, his silhouette blocking the city lights beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass. He'd been asking impossible questions since 1998—about projections, about deliverables, about why she stayed when her colleagues had long ago found lives outside these glass walls.

She looked at the spreadsheet on her screen. Numbers that didn't matter. Problems that would regenerate tomorrow like hydra heads.

Something cracked inside her—maybe the same thing that had cracked when Mark left last spring, his suitcase thudding down the stairs like a countdown. When her mother called, sounding smaller and smaller across the phone lines. When she'd forgotten her own birthday three weeks running.

Maya stood up. Her joints popped like old floorboards.

"Where are you going?" Richard asked, not really curious, just keeping the sphinx routine sharp. "The quarterly review isn't finished."

"I don't know the riddle anymore," she said, and it was the truth. "Maybe I never did."

She walked out, past security, into the cool air. And then she was **running**—really running, heels abandoned in the dumpster, stockings ripping against asphalt, lungs burning with something that felt almost like life. The city blurred past in streaks of streetlamp gold and taxi yellow, and she didn't stop until she reached the river, where the water kept moving while everything else stayed stuck.

By dawn, she'd rented the smallest apartment she could find, bought a ticket to somewhere she'd never been. The sphinx could find another victim. The zombie could finally, properly, die.

Somewhere, the sun was coming up.