The Last Riddle at Midnight

Michael drags himself into the bistro at 2 AM, feeling like a zombie that forgot how to die three years ago in Prague. His handler—Sphinx, named for his encrypted, riddling briefings—already waits in the shadowed booth, spinach salad untouched before him.

"Eat," Sphinx says without greeting. "You're deteriorating."

Michael pushes the spinach around his plate, green leaves wilting under his attention. "Asset?"

"Compromised. Or turned. Or dead—the reports contradict like always." Sphinx leans forward, eyes ancient and tired. "The riddle isn't what happened to him. It's what's happening to you."

The question hangs there, heavy and unanswerable. Michael thinks of surveillance footage watched until eyes burned, of lies that became truth, of the man he used to be before this work hollowed him out piece by piece. He thinks of the wife who left because she couldn't sleep beside a man who wouldn't talk about the blood on his hands.

"What are we becoming?" Sphinx asks softly, and Michael finally understands—this isn't about the asset. This is a funeral for the living.

"Dead men," Michael says, "who forgot to stop walking."

Sphinx nods, satisfied and sorrowing both. Then: "There's one more mission."

Michael looks at the spinach, at his hands, at the man who sends him back into the dark again and again because neither of them knows how to live in the light anymore.

"When do I stop?"

"That's the riddle," Sphinx says. "I've been asking it twenty years."

Michael eats the spinach. It tastes like dust and time, like everything he's lost and everything he can't remember wanting to keep. Somewhere outside, a siren wails, and he stands to follow it into the dark one more time.