The Riddle of the Fifteenth Floor

Marcus stood before the floor-to-ceiling window on the fifteenth floor, watching the rain streak like tears down the glass. Behind him, his team shuffled through their morning routine—coffee cups, vacant stares, the mechanical rhythm of keyboards. They were all zombies now, really. Not the flesh-eating kind from movies, but something worse: the animate dead who'd forgotten they were ever truly alive.

"The client wants changes to the pyramid scheme," Sarah said, sliding a document across his desk. She wouldn't meet his eyes. They'd slept together three months ago, after the holiday party when everyone was too drunk to remember why they shouldn't. Now she moved through the office like a ghost, haunting the places she'd once inhabited with something like joy.

Marcus looked at the architectural renderings. The luxury condo development shaped like a pyramid—pretentious, geometric, climbing toward a heaven that didn't want them. "What kind of changes?"

"More balconies. Better views. Something to make them forget they're buying into a pyramid scheme in both senses of the word." She finally looked at him, and the weariness in her eyes made his chest ache. "They also want a sphinx at the entrance. A literal one. Marble.

"A sphinx."

"To give it character."

Marcus laughed, and it sounded like something breaking. "We're building monuments to excess on the backs of people who will spend thirty years paying for the privilege, and they think a sphinx will give it character."

"It's not funny, Marcus."

"No," he said, turning back to the window. "I suppose it's not."

The rain had intensified. Water pooled on the balcony, cascading in miniature rivers toward the edge. He thought about his father, who'd drowned in six inches of water in a bathtub after a stroke—how little it took to end everything. How fragile the whole enterprise really was.

"I'm leaving," Sarah said quietly.

"The firm?"

"Everything. I'm moving to Oregon. My sister has a cabin near the water. I need to remember what it feels like to be something other than this." She gestured at the office, at the pyramid drawings, at all of them.

Marcus turned. The sphinx's riddle wasn't what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening. The riddle was how you kept walking when you'd forgotten why you'd started in the first place.

"Take me with you," he said.

Sarah smiled, and for the first time in months, she looked alive. "I thought you'd never ask."