Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Legal equality was restored in 2037, but equality on paper and equality in practice are different things. Kat briefed me on this before I left, the social stratification that still lingers, the neighborhoods that are effectively segregated, the jobs and opportunities that somehow never quite reach certain populations. America wants to believe it’s healed, but there are still scars here, and they say otherwise. After all, America has always been this way, and has never strayed from how it was intended to function by its Founding Fathers.
I get off at 50th Street and climb up into the pale sunlight. Times Square assaults me immediately—a canyon of holographic billboards and scrolling news feeds and advertisements that seem to know exactly where I’m looking. Vanguard’s face flashes past on at least three screens, that perfect smile, those blue eyes. America’s Hero. The World’s Protector. Global Dynamix branding, subtle as a bloody sledgehammer.
I stand there for a moment, letting the crowd flow around me, and just look.
Gawk is more like it.
This is his city now. His image is everywhere—on buses, on billboards, on the T-shirts of tourists posing for photos. He’s become something more than a man, more than a soldier. He’s become a symbol, the face of recovery, proof America can take its worst impulses and transform them into something heroic.
Or, at least, that’s the story they’re selling.
And I ain’t buying it.
I check my burner phone and see a message from Bayo, who arrived with Kat late last night, confirming the safehouse address with a time for our meet, everything written in code. I have three hours before I need to be anywhere, which means three hours to get my bearings, check into my hotel, and start getting into the right headspace, start becoming someone I’m not.
I start walking, and New York swallows me whole. I’m so swept away with the glitz and grit and buzz and excitement of it all that I wish I had someone I could call and talk about this with, wish I had a reason to take photos, so I could share them with someone later.
My hotel is in Midtown—nice enough to suggest Vantage has a decent expense account, anonymous enough that no one looks twice at a woman traveling alone. The lobby is all warm lighting and leather armchairs, the kind of generic elegance that says respectable business travelers stay here without committing to any actual personality. I check in under Mia Baxter, accept the key card, and take the elevator to the thirtieth floor.
The room is better than I expected—burgundy walls, navy bedding, floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the city that almost makes up for the seven-hour flight. I stand there for a moment, watching the traffic crawl along the streets below, the afternoon light catching the windows of a hundred buildings.
I quickly shower off the plane grime, change into jeans and a black sweater, and do a quick sweep for bugs. It’s clean, as I expected, but you can never be too careful. Someone can always be listening.
Then, I throw on my leather jacket and a scarf and head back out. The safehouse is a twenty-minute walk, and I use the time to memorize the neighborhood—escape routes, blind spots, which bodegas have back exits and which streets dead-end into nothing. These are things I do without thinking, habits that have been ingrained in me, habits that have saved my life and the lives of others more than once.
The building for our hideout is a prewar walk-up on 49th near 10th, sandwiched between a laundromat and a place that sells organic adaptogen doughnuts for six dollars each. The super is a heavyset guy smoking on the stoop who doesn’t look up as I pass. Good. Bayo’s done his work.
I run up the stairs to the fourth floor and apartment 4C. I knock twice, pause, knock three times.
The door swings open, and Bayo’s face splits into a grin. “About bloody time. I was starting to think you’d gotten lost.”
“Please. I never get lost.” I slip inside, and he closes the door behind me, throwing three separate locks plus a chain. “I just like taking the scenic route.”
The apartment is small but functional—a living room with a battered couch, a kitchenette that’s seen better decades, and enough tech crammed onto a rickety table to make GCHQ weep with envy. Monitors, hard drives, a tangle of cables that looks like a robot’s nervous system all spread out like a virus. It’s Bayo’s natural habitat, one that’s taken over the area surprisingly fast.
Kat is perched on a stool by the window, camera in hand, looking exactly like what she’s pretending to be, a freelance photographer with a vaguely Eastern European air. She’s done something different with her hair, gotten a blowout with some highlights, and she’s wearing a chunky knit sweater that makes her look almost approachable.