The Corporate Cat's Revenge

The fluorescent lights hummed their usual migraine-inducing melody as Elena adjusted her wig in the bathroom mirror. Another day, another disguise. She wasn't actually a spy—unless you counted corporate espionage as real espionage, which her ex-husband's lawyer certainly had—but she'd spent the past six months posing as a consultant to gather evidence on her former company's illicit data harvesting. The fedora she wore to complete her transformation felt ridiculous, like she was playing dress-up in a noir film.

"You look like hell, El."

She jumped. Marcus stood in the doorway, holding a cat carrier. His striped tie was loose, his eyes rimmed with exhaustion. They'd been something more than colleagues once, back before everything between them had curdled into awkward silences and half-finished sentences.

"Rough night?" she asked.

"Sarah left. Took the dog. I got the cat." He lifted the carrier. "His name is Insurance."

Elena laughed despite herself. "You named your cat Insurance?"

"She threatened to take him too. I called him that so she'd think he was an asset." The corner of his mouth twitched. "Dark times call for dark humor, El."

The corporate zombie shuffle began at 9 AM sharp—hundreds of employees moving through the open-plan office like the walking dead, eyes glazed from too many spreadsheets, souls worn thin by quarterly targets and endless meetings that could have been emails. Elena had become one of them, or maybe she always had been. The difference now was that she knew she was pretending.

Her phone buzzed. Unknown number. The contact she'd been cultivating in IT, ready to hand over the files she needed to blow the whole operation wide open. But looking at Marcus—really looking at him, at the way his shoulders slumped under the weight of a life that had somehow unraveled—she felt something shift.

"Marcus," she said, "what if we just walked away?"

"What?"

"The evidence. The revenge. What if we stopped being zombies and started living?" She reached for his hand, her fingers brushing his wrist. "I have a friend in Oregon who runs a sanctuary. For cats. For people who need to remember what it means to be human."

He looked at her for a long moment, really looked at her, like he was seeing something he'd missed for years. Then he smiled—genuine, reaching his eyes.

"Does Insurance need a passport?"

She took off her hat and let her wig fall away. "I think we can manage that."