What the Sphinx Knows

Elena picked at her spinach salad, the raw leaves catching the afternoon light through the window of Sphinx Tower's forty-second floor cafeteria. Behind her, the city sprawled like a bruised dream, but all she could think about was whether she had something between her teeth.

"You've been quiet," Marcus said, not looking up from his phone. "Everything okay?"

She'd been sleeping with him for three months, ever since the corporate merger announcement. Everyone at Sphinx Pharmaceuticals was on edge—whispers of layoffs, department heads called into meetings and emerging gray-faced. The office grapevine said there was a spy, someone leaking proprietary research to their biggest competitor.

"Just tired," Elena said, pushing spinach around her plate. "The audit's killing me."

Marcus laughed bitterly. "Tell me about it. They've got half the legal department reviewing every email from the past six months. Paranoia's the new culture."

Elena's stomach tightened. She'd been using her personal email to send documents to her home computer—just to work late, she'd told herself, nothing nefarious. But every time she opened the encrypted files, every time she copied the formulas onto her personal drive, she'd felt the weight of something she couldn't name.

"You know what they say," Marcus said, finally meeting her eyes. "The riddle isn't who's leaking. It's why."

His phone buzzed. He checked it, then stood up abruptly. "I have to go. HR needs me."

Elena watched him walk away, noticed a small smear of pesto on his chin—ironic, given her own paranoia. When he was gone, she pulled out her own phone. Three unread messages from an unknown number.

*We know what you did with the synthesis data. Meet us in the parking garage, level B3. Now.*

Her hands trembled. She'd done it for the money—her mother's medical bills were piling up, the insurance company denying every claim. Six transfers over three months, careful, methodical, convinced she was too small to notice.

The sphinx had been watching all along.

She stood up, abandoned her half-eaten lunch, and headed toward the elevator. In the reflection of the glass doors, she checked her teeth. No spinach. But something else entirely had been caught there all along.