The Last Living Soul

Marina poured the third glass of wine and watched her cat, Balthazar, weave through the empty moving boxes. He was the only thing she'd kept from the life before—the surveillance, the dead drops, the midnight flights from cities she couldn't pronounce. Three years out of the Agency, and she still checked exits before sitting down. Still catalogued faces in crowds. Still felt that strange electric hum of danger in her chest when someone walked too close behind her.

She'd been a spy once. Not the cinematic kind—no glamorous dresses or poisoned umbrellas. She'd been an analyst who sometimes did "fieldwork," which meant sitting in cafés for twelve hours, watching dissident journalists meet their sources, or photographing arms deals through hotel windows. The work had hollowed her out, piece by piece, until she'd become something like a zombie—alive but not living, moving through the world with no stake in it, no touch left in her.

The man she was meeting tonight worked there still. David had reached out last week, his email cryptic as ever: "I have something. The Reykjavik operation. We need to talk." The Reykjavik op had been the final crack in her foundation—the mission that made her realize she was just weaponized guilt in a pantsuit.

Balthazar jumped onto the windowsill, his golden eyes fixed on something outside. Marina joined him. A black sedan parked across the street, engine idling. David's car? Or something else?

"You notice too," she murmured, scratching behind his ears. "That's why I kept you."

The cat had been her rescue in Reykjavik—a starving stray she'd smuggled into her hotel room, the first living thing she'd cared about in years. Bringing him home had been her first act of rebellion. Her first real choice.

The sedan's door opened. David stepped out, looking older than she remembered—his face drawn, his movements heavy. He wasn't a zombie, not yet. But he was becoming one. She could see it in the way his eyes darted toward her windowsill, then away. In the way he carried himself like a man who'd forgotten what it meant to be unobserved.

Marina's phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number: "He's not alone. The Agency knows about the meet. They're using him to get to you."

She watched David approach her building, watched the cat watch David, and felt something ancient and weary settle in her chest. The choice was simple, really. She'd already made it three years ago when she'd chosen the cat over the career. Choosing it again was just practice.

She turned off her phone. She drew the curtains. She poured another glass of wine and lifted Balthazar onto her lap, burying her face in his soft fur as the doorbell rang, and rang, and then fell silent.