The Corporate Undead

The fluorescent lights hummed at a frequency that made Elena's teeth ache. Three years of corporate espionage had taught her to read people, to extract secrets with a smile and a carefully placed question. But lately, she'd begun to feel like the secrets were extracting something from her instead.

Her cat, Barnaby, watched from the windowsill as she swallowed her daily vitamin cocktail—D for the windowless office, B-complex for the stress, iron for the slow blood loss of her soul. She'd been working Marcus's case for six months, posing as a consultant to uncover whether the pharmaceutical startup was siphoning research to a competitor. The answer was yes, but somewhere along the way, she'd started sleeping with the target.

Marcus found her in the building's pool at midnight, swimming laps in the darkness. The water was her only reprieve, the only place where the weight of her double life didn't crush her chest.

"You're like the rest of us," he said, sitting on the edge, feet in the water. "Walking around like zombies, pretending to be alive."

He knew. He'd always known.

"The report files itself tomorrow," she said, treading water. "Your competitor gets everything."

"I know." Marcus's expression was unreadable. "I'm not the target, Elena. I'm the spy."

The water went cold. The startup was a front—a testing ground for corporate intelligence methods. Marcus had been hired to observe how a corporate spy operates. He'd been studying her.

"So what happens now?" she asked.

"We finish our jobs." He stood up. "Or we decide that some things matter more than the paycheck."

Barnaby was waiting at the door when she got home. For the first time in three years, she didn't reach for her vitamins. She sat on the floor and let the cat knead her arms with sharp claws, feeling something like pain, something like waking up.