The Green Between Your Teeth

Mara hadn't felt like herself since the merger. Six months of waking before dawn, forcing her body into clothes that felt like costumes, commuting to a glass tower where everyone moved with the glazed determination of the undead. A corporate **zombie**, that's what she'd become—shuffling between meetings, consuming coffee instead of brains, but the hunger was the same.

Then came the night she found the bug.

It was tucked inside the potted peace lily he'd given her their first anniversary, a tiny black eye among the soil. Marcus worked in intelligence, or so he claimed. Some vague government contract that required travel at odd hours, encrypted phones, passwords she was never permitted to know. She'd trusted him, loved him even, through three years of missed birthdays and champagne that never got drunk.

Now she knew: Marcus wasn't protecting national security. He was a **spy**, and she was his assignment.

The revelation didn't hit her like a bullet. It settled softly, like snow, as she stood in their kitchen chopping **spinach** for a salad neither of them would eat. The green leaves scattered across the cutting board like miniature maps of territories she'd never claimed. She remembered their first date—Marcus laughing as she'd gotten spinach stuck in her teeth, how he'd reached across the table to brush it away with his thumb. That gesture of intimacy had been reconnaissance, she realized now. Every caress calculated, every late-night conversation debriefed.

She dumped the spinach into the trash.

That's when she saw it through the kitchen window: a **fox** standing at the edge of their meticulously manicured backyard. Its russet coat glowed under the security lights, electric and impossible against the manicured suburbia. It watched her through the glass, something ancient and wild in its yellow eyes.

Mara dropped the knife.

The fox turned and vanished into the darkness beyond the fence line, into a world that couldn't be monitored, couldn't be owned, couldn't be controlled. She looked back at the lily, at the camera, at the life she'd been living like a woman sleepwalking through someone else's dream.

The front lock clicked. Marcus was home early.

Mara picked up her phone and dialed a number she'd found taped inside the bug's casing. A woman answered on the first ring.

"I know what he is," Mara said. "But more importantly—I know what I'm not."

Outside, beneath the waxing moon, something howled. For the first time in six months, she felt entirely, terrifyingly alive.