The Last Shift

Mara sat at the edge of the infinity pool, her legs submerged in water that had turned the color of a faded bruise. Below, the city lights flickered like dying stars. She checked her watch again — 2:17 AM. The cable installation was supposed to be finished hours ago.

Her phone buzzed. Another message from David: *Still at the office?* She didn't reply. Instead, she watched an orange slice bobbing in the pool — some remnant from a corporate event that had ended three hours before. The fruit had absorbed so much water it was barely recognizable anymore, swollen and translucent.

The guest room on the fourth floor had no internet. The executive was furious, threatening to charge back the entire conference fee. Mara had spent the last four hours tracing cables through walls, crawling under desks, resetting routers that reset nothing. Her lower back throbbed. She was thirty-four years old, and this was her life.

Then she saw it: a splice where the cable had been improperly terminated, hidden behind a panel in the utility closet. Someone had cut corners, probably years ago. She'd been blaming the new equipment when the problem had been there all along, waiting for someone to notice.

She fixed it in seven minutes.

Lightning cracked across the sky, illuminating the pool in a flash of violet white. For a moment, everything was sharp and terrible — the water's surface like shattered glass, the orange slice suddenly fluorescent, the city below frozen mid-blink.

Then darkness returned.

Her phone lit up again. David: *I'm staying at my brother's tonight.*

Mara realized she'd been holding her breath. She exhaled slowly, watching the ripples spread across the pool's surface. The cable was fixed. The internet would work tomorrow. The executive would get his connection. The conference would proceed as if nothing had been wrong.

She pulled her legs from the water, dripping onto the concrete. Behind her, the orange slice continued its slow rotation, caught in a current that no longer had anything to do with the storm. Some things, once broken, could be fixed. Others just kept circling the same empty pool, waiting for someone to finally notice they were drowning.