The Lightning Palm

The storm broke over Barcelona just as Elena lifted her magnifying glass to the sphinx's damaged paw. Ancient Egyptian limestone, cool and alien under her fingertips, transported her from the climate-controlled museum to windswept deserts she'd never actually visited.

"You're going to work through the night?" Marcus asked, leaning against her doorframe with that practiced casualness that never quite fooled her anymore.

"It's coming due Monday."

"Monday's flexible."

"For whom?" She kept her eyes on the artifact.

Marcus laughed — short, sharp, like the lightning that fractured the sky outside her window. "For everyone who matters. Come to dinner. My sister's restaurant. Gazpacho that'll make you weep."

Elena hesitated. The sphinx's calcified wound in the palm of its paw seemed to echo the hollow ache in her chest. Three years of Marcus's friendship, of evenings spent debriefing over tapas, of him listening to her marriage dissolve into uncomfortable silence over long-distance calls.

The Chinese collector had offered twice the museum's budget for the restored piece. She wasn't supposed to know.

"Rain check?" she said.

His smile didn't reach his eyes. "You're missing the best part of summer, Elena."

After he left, she opened the encrypted file she'd discovered on his laptop during the department Christmas party — photos of her restoration work, timestamped and forwarded to Shanghai. Fox-faced bastard. Her throat tightened with something too heavy to be betrayal. She'd known, somewhere beneath all those dinners and shared confidences, that Marcus was primarily in the business of Marcus.

The lightning illuminating her workspace caught something in the sphinx's damaged palm — a microchip, embedded centuries before its time, pulsing with a light that made her breath catch.

Suddenly, she understood whose spy she'd actually been all along.

Outside, the storm raged on.