The Last Orange

The corporate cafeteria at 3 AM has a particular quality of light—harsh, fluorescent, making everything look slightly diseased. Elena sat alone, peeling an orange, the citrus scent sharp and startling against the recycled air. She'd been running on caffeine and adrenaline for seventy-two hours, undercover as a logistics consultant for a company that probably didn't exist in any meaningful way anymore. Not that it mattered. Her job was to observe, document, disappear.

"You look like shit," said Marcus, sliding into the chair across from hers. He was the zombie ops manager—a designation that still made her want to laugh, though the humor had worn thin somewhere around year three. "Management wants to know if you've got anything useful."

Elena sectioned the orange. "They're laundering money through something called 'educational software.' It's a shell game, Marcus. The same one we've seen twelve times this year."

"And the target?"

"Sleeping with his assistant. Embezzling. Ordering orange juice with breakfast every morning like clockwork." She popped a segment into her mouth. "He's lonely. He's not a threat to anyone except himself."

Marcus's phone buzzed. He checked it, his face flickering with something like pity or exhaustion—hard to tell the difference anymore. "They're calling it. Pack it up. New assignment Monday."

"That's it? Three months of my life, and we're just... walking away?"

"You know the drill. The client got cold feet. Or found someone cheaper." Marcus stood up, hesitated. "You should sleep, Elena. You're starting to forget things."

She watched him go, then finished her orange, sticky juices on her fingers, bright and terrible and real. Outside, the city sprawled gray and endless, full of people spying on people, everyone running from something toward nothing, zombies of their own making. Elena licked the last sweetness from her thumb and thought about how many oranges she'd peel before she remembered what she was running from, or whether she'd ever know at all.